Richard Pyle wrote:
You are not. Nothing in my proposal prevents resampling of an Individual. In fact, nothing in my proposal prevents *anything* you want to do, as far as I can tell. But your proposal prevents me from representing parts of an whole organism as Individuals unto themselves, which is especially encumbering when I know that I have many, many, many parts of whole organisms for which other parst of the same whole organism exist, but I lack the knowledge to build those links.
What your proposal does is to repeat the mistake that was made with Occurrence (well I consider it a mistake for a fully normalized model). You want to take metadata terms that apply in one particular subset of cases (the terms that describe the physical aspects of the individual and its pieces) and combine them with terms that apply to a more general situation (the terms that describe the role that Individual plays as a node connecting multiple Occurrences to Identifications or as a joining table in a database). This sounds good to you because you mostly deal with the physical aspects of individuals and their pieces but some people (photographers and people who make observations) don't need to describe the physical aspect because they don't collect them.
My apples/orange analogy would be better if I'd said that you are talking about apples and I'm talking about trees. One could create a class called dwc:Tree and then say that a tree is a dwc:Tree having scope property "whole thing" and that the apple is dwc:Tree having scope property "apple". But there are properties that apply to trees in general (i.e. to trees that aren't apple trees or that don't even have fruit) and there are properties that apply specifically to apples. There would be little benefit to defining dwc:Tree in this way because you would then have the circumstance where you would have to complicate things by saying that when you talk about stuff like leaves and bark that those can't be applied to dwc:Tree (apple) but they can be applied to dwc:Tree (whole). If you are going to apply those kinds of restrictions, then why not just define dwc:Tree and dwc:Apple and if anybody cares, you can try to explain how the apple is connected to the tree. As I said, I could probably write RDF examples to demonstrate this more concretely, but I don't have time now because I'm so far behind on other tasks.
Steve