Among the ResourceRelationship terms in DwC, we have the following key properties denoting subject and object of the asserted relationship:

resourceID - "An identifier for the resource that is the subject of the relationship." relatedResourceID - "An identifier for a related resource (the object, rather than the subject of the relationship)."

Then there is relationshipOfResource, which oddly and confusingly is defined as the inverse of a property relating subject to object:

"The relationship of the resource identified by relatedResourceID to the subject (optionally identified by the resourceID)."

The comment gives examples that do nothing to suggest that the definition has this backwards, or to disambiguate: "Examples: "duplicate of", "mother of", "endoparasite of", "host to", "sibling of", "valid synonym of", "located within"."

The corresponding wiki page does not offer further clarification: https://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/ResourceRelationship

There is also a page on the TDWG-RDF wiki (which declares itself as obsolete, yet links to itself for further information): https://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/ResourceRelationship

The example on this page (Table 1) seems to assume (or is fooled or confused into thinking) that relationshipOfResource is not relating object to subject, but as one would expect subject to object.

So is the definition wrong? And if it's not, why was the relationship chosen to point in the inverse direction of what one would expect?

-hilmar