On a separate but related issue, I don't think I ever received any feedback on my question some months back regarding the scope of function of the ResourceRelationship class in DwC.
I suspect that hardly anyone is using it, and I get the sense that most people assume that it is intended to allow cross-linking instances of DwC classes with objects external to DwC-class items.
However, in my mind it serves as the *perfect* mechanism to cross-link instances of DwC classes to each other (e.g., an Occurrence to an Event; an Identification to a Taxon and Organism; a Location to an Event; etc., etc.). It also seems to me to be the perfect mechanism to represent recursive links within a Class. It's this last bit that John's recent email reminded me of.
To wit:
Term Name: associatedOrganisms Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/associatedOrganisms Namespace: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ Label: associatedOrganisms Definition: A list (concatenated and separated) of identifiers of other Organism records and their associations to this Organism. Comment: Example: "sibling of MXA-231; sibling of MXA-232".
... as well as associatedOccurrences, associatedTaxa, and possibly other "associated[xxxxx]" terms...
Shouldn't these "associations" among instances between and within DwC classes be represented as series of ResourceRelationship instances? Is this not the intended purpose for ResourceRelationship? Or, is it the intended purposes, but the various "associated[xxxx]" terms are there in order to provide a "flattened" or "denormalized" concatenation of identifiers?
Aloha, Rich