Hi Pete,
Yes, that's basically where the conversation on "Individual" began several weeks ago (i.e., that the same Individual could participate in more than one Occurrence). As we've mentioned, DwC already accomodates individualID, but there is no class for an individual. If there were, several of the properties of Occurrence would over.
Aloha, Rich
_____
From: Peter DeVries [mailto:pete.devries@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, October 24, 2010 1:18 PM To: Richard Pyle Cc: Steve Baskauf; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Treatise on Occurrence, tokens, and basisOfRecord
An individual may be represented in several occurrence records.
You might have a bird that was photographed in one study.
Banded in another study.
Then later, preserved in a museum.
I think there is a case for being able to track this individual over time.
- Pete
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 5:43 PM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
What is a bit frustrating to me is that ideas like these aren't laid out in an easy-to-understand fashion and placed in easy-to-find places. I have spent much of that last year and a half trying to understand how the whole TDWG/DwC universe is supposed to fit together.
Understood, and agreed. Part of the problem is that a lot of this stuff is driven by passionate individuals, who also happen to be highly over-committed. There's barely enough time available to do the interesting bits (conceptualizing, experimenting with implementations), let alone the less-interesting bits (documentation). Having said that, there are some early documents that go into a lot of this in great detail. One is Stan Blum's description of the ASC model. Another are a series of publications from Walter Berendsohn on "potential taxa". A lot of other stuff is floating around the Specify project, and there are some other earlier sources. But I agree, it's not easy to find, and it doesn't always cover the details we need it to in today's context.
The point that I was trying to get at (eventually) was that it was inconsistent to say that images need to be referenced as associatedMedia and sequences needed to be referenced as associatedSequences, and yet not say that specimens needed to be referenced as "associatedSpecimens".
Hmmmm...not sure I agree. If it is so that Occurrence=Individual+Event, then a Specimen can be said to *be* the Individual, whereas images, DNA sequences, and the like are the tokens. In other words, Individual "is a" Specimen; but Individual "has a" image. Now that I think about it, perhaps Specimens should not be treated on an equal par with other tokens; and indeed, maybe specimens aren't tokens (per your definition) at all. This is not consistent with how I've always thought about it (see my previous email), but if the elusive "Individual" is key to this relationship, then perhaps Specimens serve as bot "evidence" of an occurrence, and the "stuff" of the Individual represneted by the Occurrence.
My brain hurts.
I guess I'm thinking about this in terms of a token being something to which we can assign an identifier and retrieve a representation (a la representational state transfer). Although I don't deny the existence of memory patterns in neurons that are associated with a HumanObservation, there isn't any way that we can receive a representation of that memory directly.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "representation". We can't retrieve a specimen directly either -- but we can retrieve a database record that represents the specimen, and metadata associated with it. I think the same can be said about a human mmory (as the foundation of an observation). That is, there is a species identification, number of individuals, etc., associated with an observation that is based on the memory of the person who made the observation, and that memory is represented by a database record with associated metadata.
This conversation could go very weird, very quickly -- and maybe I'm just being difficult (in which case I apologize). But now that I see that a specimen may, in fact, be fundamentally different from other kinds of evidence supporting an occurrence, I'm not longer sure what I believe anymore (especially after the 11-hr flight from Berlin I just got off of).
Maybe the answer to this is to treat different versions of DwC as concurrent, rather than serial.
[etc.]
Yes, I agree about this concept. I think that what I'm really advocating for is that we agree on what the most normalized model is that will connect all of the existing Darwin Core classes and terms. In that sense, when I'm asking for Individual to be accepted as a class, I'm not arguing for a "new" thing, I'm arguing for a clarification of what we mean when we use the existing term dwc:individualID.
Makes sense to me.
Aloha, Rich
_______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content