[tdwg-content] Proposal to create a new DwC term for the class Individual

[Markus Döring]

Steve,
a very reasonable addition to DarwinCore indeed. But I tend to agree with John that we should first tackle this in the ontology development which is taking place right now mainly driven by Roger and Dave. Classes in DwC were created in a slightly ad hoc fashion based on what data we were already exchanging - primarily occurrences and taxonomic. So they are not covering all needs. But instead of quickly adding more classes one by one I would hope to get a better overview of required classes first. The current refactoring of the ontology is a perfect oppertunity for this. With the ontology developing we also need to make sure how to synchronise it with DwC terms. I can imagine that it turns out best to add new ontology classes and even properties to DwC once we found them to be stable and agreed. I guess all Im saying is with DwC moving forward a lot last year and now being ratified I prefer to give it a rest and adopt it as is and pass the torch on to the ontology development which has been mostly standing still last year.

Markus


Am Jan 22, 2010 um 3:31 schrieb Steve Baskauf:

> This issue is with reference to 
> http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=69
> 
> I have proposed the creation of a new Darwin Core term, Individual, that 
> is a class representing individual organisms in their environment (as 
> opposed to live organisms in collections which would be Occurrences of 
> type LivingSpecimen).  The justification for this new term is given at 
> the link above, but to summarize, this class is needed:
> 1. to establish the concept of an individual (in the sense of the object 
> of dwc:individualID) and its relationship to other classes in the TDWG 
> ontology.
> 2. to provide a way for users who assign a GUID as a value for the dwc 
> term individualID to meet Recommendation 11 (regarding GUID typing) of 
> the draft TDWG GUID Applicability Statement. 
> 
> I should also note that the problem that my proposal is intended to 
> resolve may exist for other terms in the new Darwin Core standard that 
> can refer to resources that can be identified with GUIDs.  In 
> particular, there may be no existing classes in the TDWG ontology
> http://tdwg-ontology.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ontology/voc/
> for GUID-labeled resources that are referenced by identificationID 
> datasetID, eventID, and locationID .  The lack of an appropriate means 
> to type objects identified by GUIDs is only one of the impediments to 
> the implementation of GUIDs in the biodiversity community, but it is one 
> that can be solved relatively quickly by appropriate action on the part 
> of the TDWG technical architecture group.
> 
> Steve Baskauf
> 
> -- 
> Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
> Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
> 
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