Good idea, but it suffers from the same fate as might associatedOccurrences (not previously mentioned because I was after some clarification in principle, with the herbarium duplicate sheets only one current case of interest): I need to follow whatever the community practice is of regarding a sheet as part of a duplicate set distributed by the original collector. I'm told by the people at the Harvard University Herbaria that "duplicate" usually, but not always, means from the same organism and same collection event---occasionally people used to put several organisms on the same sheet, raising the possibility that they are not even the same taxon. Worse, the different parts of the same organism might be catalogued as separate specimens. In this case, an assertion that they are from the same individual might be true and understandable, but the utility of that assertion depends on your purpose. Consider a use case in which one set of traditional duplicates all have a determination that is out of date, but another specimen---say your acorn collected later from the same tree---has a current determination. For purposes of notifying duplicate holders that a new determination has been made to the original, the later acorn may not be interesting. This means that for this use, a distributed query of the form "find all records with the same dwc:individualID" is not as useful as "find all records with the same dwc:eventID".
Also, as Mark writes, it doesn't address any other associatedOccurrences.
More generally, we are working on annotations of data records. Probably what the real issue here is that associatedOccurrences is an assertion about organisms, and we are making assertions about occurrence data.
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
Bob, It seems to me that the most semantically clear way to indicate in a machine-readable way that two herbarium sheets are duplicates would be to assert that they have the same dwc:individualID. individualID is defined as "An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms represented in the Occurrence" so asserting that two occurrences represent the same individual or named group of individual organisms pretty much exactly describes what duplicate specimens are. I use this same approach to indicate that http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67307 is an image of an acorn from the same tree: http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/ind-baskauf/67304 as the bark image http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/67312 I won't say more here as I have written more extensively on this approach in Biodiversity Informatics 7:17-44 (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi/article/view/3664).%C2%A0 You can also look at the RDF associated with those GUIDs to see what I mean. Solving this problem is also one of the reasons I have proposed adding the class Individual to DwC (i.e. so that the individuals that are the object of dwc:individualID can be rdfs:type'd using a well-known vocabulary and therefore be "understood" by linked data clients).
Steve
Bob Morris wrote:
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#associatedOccurrences carries this description:
associatedOccurrences Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/associatedOccurrences Class: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Occurrence Definition: A list (concatenated and separated) of identifiers of other Occurrence records and their associations to this Occurrence. Comment: Example: "sibling of FMNH:Mammal:1234; sibling of FMNH:Mammal:1235". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Occurrence Details: associatedOccurrences
My questions: a. Are the names of the associations, and/or the syntax of the value meant to be community defined? b. If no to a. , where are those definitions? If yes, Have any communities defined any names and syntax? I am especially interested in "duplicate of" in the case of herbarium sheets." c. (May share an answer with b.) Is there any use being made by anyone in which associatedOccurrences is designed to have machine-readable values. If yes, where?
Thanks Bob
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
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