[tdwg-content] Request for vote on proposals to add Individual as a Darwin Core class and to add the term individualRemarks as a term within that class

Mon Nov 1 11:48:33 CET 2010

Yes, I agree with statements made by Bob, Kevin, and Rich: if we get the 
class Individual, we need to think carefully what properties go with it. 
The only one that is obvious to me at the present is individualRemarks.  
In line with what Bob said, I think that figuring out how we will use 
terms and trying to model relationships and properties in RDF will make 
it more clear what terms can be appropriately used with instances of 
various classes and whether it "works" to have a term be applied to 
several classes.  I think individualCount is a case in point.  At first 
it seemed to me that it should be in the Individual class, because it's 
a property of Individual the way I've defined Individual.  But since the 
count may change with time, then maybe it should be a property of 
Occurrence (which are essentially observations of the Individual at 
different times).  But how often is anyone actually going to track the 
number of individuals over time?  I could see it happening with wolf 
packs, but in that case one would probably rather track each individual 
wolf rather than calling the whole pack an "individual".  So what makes 
sense depends on how people need to use individualCount.

Rich commented that he wasn't sure why catalog number wasn't in the 
Record Level terms.  I'm also wondering about that, particularly since I 
would use a catalog number with a token (e.g. PreservedSpecimen, 
StillImage) or Individual (if it were a living specimen) but probably 
not for an Occurrence (although somebody else might).  I believe that in 
a previous discussion of the xxxxxxxID terms on tdwg-content (can't 
check because Internet is out at my house and I'm working offline) 
someone said that all of those terms should go into the Record Level 
terms because one might use them as properties for various classes.  But 
that hasn't happened.  Is that because nobody has gotten around to it or 
because it takes some kind of official action to "change the standard"?  
To recap that conversation from memory, it was agreed that people 
appropriately use the xxxxxxxID terms two ways: as column headings in a 
database table to indicate what the identifier is for the row, and as ID 
references connecting the row to records in other tables.  In the first 
kind of use, it makes sense to have xyzID in the class xyz, but in the 
second case it does not.  You can see an example of these dual uses in 
the DwC XML guide.  This is another example where some clear 
instructions on the use of terms in the DwC documentation would help 
(i.e. to say that both of these kinds of uses are acceptable).  When I 
was trying to understand Paul's email on Taxon and Name, I was having 
trouble because I was continually confused about which of the two ways 
of using xxxxxxID terms he was intending as either would apparently be 
correct.

With regards to "individualScope", I was assuming that could be covered 
in individualRemarks.  I suppose individualScope could have a controlled 
vocabulary and individualRemarks not.  But again, I think we can see how 
people want to use Individuals before deciding what terms need to go 
with it (assuming that Individual gets added to DwC). 

Steve

Bob Morris wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Kevin Richards 
> <RichardsK at landcareresearch.co.nz 
> <mailto:RichardsK at landcareresearch.co.nz>> wrote:
> > Not sure if this has been mentioned as I have struggled to keep up 
> with this thread, but it sounds to me like the benefit of the 
> Individual class/properties is to be able > to link together various 
> web resources that refer to data obtained from the same individual in 
> some manner, so we probably need terms that allow the description of > 
> how these individuals, or parts of individuals relate to each other. 
>  The Scope idea will help, but maybe there is a need for terms like 
> "partOfIndividual",
> > "derivedFromIndividual"?
>
> Now you're talkin Kevin!  Actually, now you're talking about ontology, 
> and I plead: Go slow, develop use cases; develop competency questions; 
> develop tools. I note that Steve was careful to separate the question 
> of adding terms to the normative, representation free, DwC, from the 
> problem(s) of making an RDF representation of same:
>
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Steve Baskauf 
> <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu <mailto:steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu>> 
> wrote: >
> > I am pleased with the significant and thoughtful discussion that has 
> taken place on the tdwg-content email list
> > regarding the relationships among Occurrences,
> > Individuals, and other entities that are a part of the community's 
> thinking about biodiversity metadata
> > and the way that those metadata are structured. [...] I feel that > 
> would be critical for
> >facilitating the ultimate development of a recommendation for the 
> representation of Darwin Core as RDF.
> > [...]
>
>
> This separation is important, because what use one intends to make of 
> an RDF representation has a lot of bearing on what "gotcha's" one has 
> to take care about.
>
> For example, if there is a desire to exploit formal semantics 
> available for RDF stack ---which will probably emerge as a requirement 
> once one starts talking about relations between properties---then 
> different surprises will emerge from the pitfalls if one "merely" 
> wishes to put SKOS relations on the properties and reason about the 
> SKOS instead of the science. But I guess, for example, that Miranker's 
> Morphster project [1] will benefit most in its current use cases, from 
> good mereological ontologies for descriptive data, not just stuff like 
> "more general than".
>
> There are surprises even in the simplest use of RDFS and formalisms 
> about classes. I've previously whined about premature assignment of 
> rdfs:domain while conceding (did I???) that it can sometimes make a 
> designer's intention clearer to humans. Perhaps more startling is that 
> type assignment automatically "creates" an rdfs:class if one was not 
> already available, due to the formal semantics of rdf:type [3]. Thus, 
> in an earlier posting, Paul Murray  has (unintentionally?) introduced 
> a new class apni:TaxonName in 33407.rdf [2] via
>     <rdf:type 
> rdf:resource="http://biodiversity.org.au/voc/apni/APNI#TaxonName"/>
>
> Then there is the question of adequate tools for the desired style of 
> ontology architecture. The OWL community's important tools are not 
> friendly even to DublinCore, whose style is(?) what DwC follows. 
> (Steve Baskauf has complained to me in private email that the 
> Manchester validators don't seem to even check rdfs vocabulary 
> correctly; Paul complained that Protege4 makes a big mishmash of 
> Properties when importing DwC. (Both of these are probably false 
> positives in cases of insufficient typing of properties themselves, 
> and the OWL community probably doesn't care about the origin or 
> utility of such weak typing  [4]. )
>
> So the hard part is yet to come.  But I agree with you. It is quite 
> appealing.
>
> Bob Morris
>
> Robert A. Morris
> Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
> UMASS-Boston
> 100 Morrissey Blvd
> Boston, MA 02125-3390
> Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
> email: morris.bob at gmail.com <mailto:morris.bob at gmail.com>
> web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
> web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram <http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram>
> phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
>
> [1] 
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~miranker/studentWeb/MorphsterHomePage.html 
> <http://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Emiranker/studentWeb/MorphsterHomePage.html>
> [2] http://biodiversity.org.au/apni.name/33407.rdf
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_type
> [4]  
> https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/p4-feedback/2009-October/002448.html
>
>
> -- 
>
>

-- 
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

postal mail address:
VU Station B 351634
Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.

delivery address:
2125 Stevenson Center
1161 21st Ave., S.
Nashville, TN 37235

office: 2128 Stevenson Center
phone: (615) 343-4582,  fax: (615) 343-6707
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20101101/50c98d07/attachment.html 