Thanks, Julian -- I somehow missed Stan's post (among a flurry of other emails - both from this list, and from other sources). Sorry about that, Stan! So, after now having read Stan's post, I do agree that the "who and how" (I'm leaving out the "what they did", to avoid people mistaking it for the "what they saw") -- that is, the "action" (in my terms) of the Event -- should, indeed, be regarded as part of the Event, and not part of the Occurrence (although I still maintain it could legitimately be interpreted either way). I should also take this opportunity to mention MUSE and FishGopher as being among the very early efforts to organize this sort of information in a form that could be distributed over the proto-Net. Aloha, Rich

-----Original Message----- From: Julian H [mailto:humphries@mail.utexas.edu] Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 1:09 PM To: Richard Pyle Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Treatise on Occurrence, tokens, and basisOfRecord [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

As Stan said in an earlier message today:

"Back to the issue of event definition: If Event is defined as just the conjunction (association, intersection, join) of space and time, there is nothing to tell you why this particular interval is of interest."

In other words the who and how and what they did that made the event of interest.

julian

At 02:30 PM 10/28/2010, Richard Pyle wrote:

...

...

Yeah, some act took place at that place and time. In the context of Occurrence, probably an act of sampling or collecting, and so one should expect metadata documenting that act (who, how, etc)

As I alluded to in my previous post, it's not clear to me whether the who, how, etc. are intrinsic properties of the Event, or if the "Event" simply represents the single coordinate in 4-D space-time; and the other stuff is more a function of the Occurrence (i.e., more metadata about documenting the tuple of Event+Individual). I can see rational arguments either way. My inclination is that the word "Event" goes beyond merely the space-time coordinate, and implies some sort of "action". As such, my inclination is to define the "Event" as more than just the 4D space-time coordinate, and include who, how, etc. as part of the "action" of the Event.

As is probably obvious, I haven't throught this through extensively yet, so I reserve the right to change my mind.

Rich

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