[tdwg-content] Background for the Individual class proposal. 3. Should an Individual also be a Collecting Unit?

[Bob Morris]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org> wrote:
>...
>
> If you're talking about these as two separate classes in DwC, I'm getting
> very nervous.  There is very little ambiguity between an instance of
> "Locality" and an instance of "Taxon".  Same can be said for the other DwC
> classes (except, maybe, Event and Occurrence -- but I think most people
> would not have any trouble deciding what those two things are).  However, I
> see a lot of ambiguity between were an Individual ends, and a
> BiologicalObject(=AccessionedUnit) begins.  To me that says that dividing
> them into separate classes is inviting confusion and inconsistent
> application of DwC to existing (and most future) datasets.
>...

Not necessarily.  If two classes share some but not all properties,
you can make them be children of a common parent class which holds (or
dare I say "is the domain of") the common properties. Then the
not-common properties can be put on each class as appropriate.
Finally, you can arrange that nothing is ever in both classes (or more
precisely, that a reasoner would signal so if it were).

Bob


-- 
Robert A. Morris
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UMASS-Boston
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