Dear all,

Sorry to have to jump in to the discussion late. I'm just back out of
the field in Jujuy where the winds took out the little connectivity
that once existed.

I'm stepping back to the beginning of the conversation, out of the RDF
representation issue, which seems to reasonable resolved under the
thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes."

The Darwin Core terms Steve has brought to attention are among a
larger set (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy,
measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) that all are
intended to cover the real world situation of data coming out of
database fields for which there was no sense of persistent global
unique identification. They were meant for literal strings for
dcterms:Agents. There is nothing to proscribe the use of URIs in these
fields. However, though there has been a lot of discussion about how
one might represent the URI and string literal information about the
recordedBy Agent, there has been no statement of consensus in the TAG
from discussions in this thread and the related thread "Darwin Core
generic XML with attributes" about whether actionable GUIDs for these
same concepts should have their own terms.

As I see it, we got this far:

In the thread "Darwin Core generic XML with attributes" Rod Page said:

"If you want a literal for <dwc:recordedBy> (say for ease of display)
then I think you want a different tag that is expressly defined to do
just that. For example,
http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonOccurrence
 has <identifiedTo>  to point to a URI for a taxon, and
<identifiedToString> if you want the literal. I don't know if dwc has
anything equivalent for recordedBy (and can somebody please tell me
why we now have so many vocabularies for the same things?)"

I think what Rod proposes is cleaner than using the same term for two
purposes, as much as I too would like to have my cake and eat it. I
agree with Rod, except that dwc:recordedBy is the string literal
version of the concept, and no URI version (something like
dwc:recordedByID refines dcterms:identifier) currently exists. Up to
now there has not been a need expressed, hence, no such term was
included in DwC.

In answer to Rod's last question, we have many vocabularies
(unfinished attempts), but only one that is is a ratified standard.
That standard isn't an ontology, nor is it complete in describing best
practices for expressing information in all representations. It's
reasonably clear for how to share information in text files, and about
the recommendations for XML, but in terms of RDF it is silent,
awaiting the badly needed ontology work.

Reviewing DwC in light of these discussions, I noted the following:

1) The set of terms (relationshipAccordingTo, georeferencedBy,
measurementDeterminedBy, recordedBy, identifiedBy) all currently
refine an abstract term dwc:accordingTo, defined as "Abstract term to
attribute information to a source." This refinement doesn't really do
anything useful in my opinion. I think the term dwc:accordingTo should
be dropped, and the terms listed above should instead refine
dcterms:contributor.

2) For one of these concepts (nameAccordingTo) it was anticipated that
there would be actionable GUIDs and the term nameAccordingToID was
added to clarify the distinction. nameAccordingTo currently also
refines dwc:accordingTo, but I think this is erroneous, as it is meant
to refer to a publication, not to a dcterms:Agent. This problem will
be resolved if dwc:accordingTo is dropped and nameAccordingTo is
changed to have no refines value.

3) In cases where actionable GUIDs were anticipated to be commonly
used, terms with names ending with "ID" were added specifically for
this purpose (relatedResourceID, resourceID, resourceRelationshipID,
higherGeographyID, parentNameUsageID, nameAccordingToID,
originalNameUsageID, eventID, individualID, occurrenceID,
geologicalContextID, namePublishedInID, measurementID,
acceptedNameUsageID, scientificNameID, locationID, identificationID,
datasetID, taxonConceptID, taxonID). All of these terms refine
dcterms:identifier and many of them are examples illustrating Rod's
recommendation to separate identifiers from string literal
representations of the concepts. If it is deemed that further "ID"
terms are needed, then a public discussion must take place on the
tdwg-content list.

Dropping dwc:accordingTo, and changing the refinements requires the
procedure under section 3.3 of the Darwin Core Namespace Policy
(http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm#classesofchanges).
I'll follow the protocol for changes for items 1 and 2 above, and
await further discussion on item 3.

Cheers,

John

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote: