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

[Paul Murray]

On 15/11/2010, at 9:22 AM, Kevin Richards wrote:

> allow more flexible use of the DwC terms.  So this is obviously an important requirement.  So my question really is, would it be possible to do both?  I.e. is it possible to have terms that can be defined as having a certain domain, then equivalent terms that are not part of the domain


Technically, this is fairly straightforward: you define the "strict" property to be a subproperty of the "lax" one (I am borrowing the terms "strict" and "lax" from XML schema language). A use of a strict property also counts as a use of the lax one, allowing queries against the lax version to pick up all instances.

With respect to managing the terms, a simple solution is to use the same property names for both versions, but to have separate namespaces (URI prefixes). DwC-strict and DwC-lax can be called different "conformance levels" (borrowing the term from the OWL documentation). 

Having this set up you can then discuss and define the DwC vocabulary in its strict sense, in terms of how the vocabulary ideally ought to be used.



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