My intention in raising this concern is not to suggest that you don't need the concept of measurable-property-type-whose-value-is-an-item-from-an-enumerated(-possibly-ordered)-set, but rather just to caution that people from other domains might be surprised to see such a thing referred to as a 'quantity'. My concern is the loss of interoperability. If the latter is a goal, then you might consider tweaking the terminology. Of course if there is a unique mapping from values in the enumerated(-and-ordered)-set to scaled numbers, then 'quantity' is fine. But if the set of 'quantityTypes' that have enumerated values is distinct from the set that have scaled numeric values, then why not recognise this in the name?

Simon

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Message: 4 Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 09:02:19 +0100 From: ?amonn ? Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Fwd: [dwc] quantity (#12) To: 'Markus D?ring' m.doering@mac.com, "'Paul J. Morris'" mole@morris.net Cc: 'TDWG Content Mailing List' tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Message-ID: 000101d01906$9d8f3250$d8ad96f0$@org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Simon's distinction of scaled number vs discrete set could probably be captured using DWC MeasurementOrFact properties. However, as discussed previously, we felt that because measurements of abundance/density/coverage were of fundamental importance in field studies, and in the spirit of DwC's pragmatic approach, they merited their own high level term(s), rather than "burying" them under MeasurementOrFact - hence the proposal of "quantity" and "quantityType" where the term "quantity" seems the most inclusive label for what we are trying to express.

Following John's recommendation, we have removed the references to examples in the definitions and expanded the examples in the comment section so it is clear how they are to be used.

quantity

#Definition A number or enumeration value for the entity being quantified in quantityType. #Comment The terms quantity and quantityType are required to be used as a pair. The value of quantity is a number or enumeration, e.g., ?27? for a quantityType ?individuals?, ?12.5? for a quantityType ?%biomass?, or ?r? for a quantityType ?BraunBlanquetScale?.

quantityType

#Definition The entity to which the number or enumeration reported in quantity refers. #Comment The terms quantity and quantityType are required to be used as a pair. The value of quantityType (i.e., the entity being measured) is expected to be drawn from a small controlled vocabulary with terms such as ?Individuals?, ?%Biomass?, ?%Biovolume?, ?%Species?, ?%Coverage?, ?BraunBlanquetScale?, ?DominScale?. Examples when combined with quantity values: + on DominScale; 5 on BraunBlanquetScale; 45 for %Biomass.

?amonn

-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Markus D?ring Sent: 15 December 2014 15:48 To: Paul J. Morris Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Fwd: [dwc] quantity (#12)

"r" is a value for very few individuals in the Braun Blanquet cover abundance scale which is used a lot in vegetation studies. It is like various others a non continous scale with discrete values. I do not think we should restrict quantity to contious numeric scales.

Markus

Am 15.12.2014 um 15:36 schrieb Paul J. Morris mole@morris.net:

Markus can probably answer this question:

What would be the expected value of QuantityType for a Quantity of "r"?

A comment Bob Morris occasionally makes is: "1 is greater than 2 for sufficently large values of 1". If some particular quantity type has a standard set of codes that represent numbers, then it might be appropriate to use those standard codes as values of quantity.

-Paul

On Mon, 15 Dec 2014 12:48:06 +0100 John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:

...

Der all,

I am forwarding this comment from Simon Cox, which was submitted to the Darwin Core development site on Github.

Cheers,

John

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Simon Cox notifications@github.com Date: Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 4:47 AM Subject: Re: [dwc] quantity (#12) To: tdwg/dwc dwc@noreply.github.com Cc: John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu

'quantity' usually implies an amount, encoded as a scaled number. In most other domains it does not include a value from an enumerated set. The latter may be called 'quality'. Both quantity and quality are subclasses of 'property'.

? Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/12#issuecomment-66946784.

-- Paul J. Morris Biodiversity Informatics Manager Harvard University Herbaria/Museum of Comparative Zo?logy mole@morris.net AA3SD PGP public key available _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content

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