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

[Richard Pyle]

> 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).

OK, that's more or less what I was trying to say (I was originally going to
use the term "Subclass", but the "BETA" in me was afraid of being scolded
for misapplying that term).

The point is, I would see the class "Individual" as the common parent, and
various other things (perhaps mutually exclusive) as the children classes.

Rich