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

[Steve Baskauf]

Richard Pyle wrote:
>
> You are not.  Nothing in my proposal prevents resampling of an Individual.
> In fact, nothing in my proposal prevents *anything* you want to do, as far
> as I can tell.  But your proposal prevents me from representing parts of an
> whole organism as Individuals unto themselves, which is especially
> encumbering when I know that I have many, many, many parts of whole
> organisms for which other parst of the same whole organism exist, but I lack
> the knowledge to build those links.
>   

What your proposal does is to repeat the mistake that was made with 
Occurrence (well I consider it a mistake for a fully normalized model).  
You want to take metadata terms that apply in one particular subset of 
cases (the terms that describe the physical aspects of the individual 
and its pieces) and combine them with terms that apply to a more general 
situation (the terms that describe the role that Individual plays as a 
node connecting multiple Occurrences to Identifications or as a joining 
table in a database).  This sounds good to you because you mostly deal 
with the physical aspects of individuals and their pieces but some 
people (photographers and people who make observations) don't need to 
describe the physical aspect because they don't collect them. 

My apples/orange analogy would be better if I'd said that you are 
talking about apples and I'm talking about trees.  One could create a 
class called dwc:Tree and then say that a tree is a dwc:Tree having 
scope property "whole thing" and that the apple is dwc:Tree having scope 
property "apple".  But there are properties that apply to trees in 
general (i.e. to trees that aren't apple trees or that don't even have 
fruit) and there are properties that apply specifically to apples.  
There would be little benefit to defining dwc:Tree in this way because 
you would then have the circumstance where you would have to complicate 
things by saying that when you talk about stuff like leaves and bark 
that those can't be applied to dwc:Tree (apple) but they can be applied 
to dwc:Tree (whole).  If you are going to apply those kinds of 
restrictions, then why not just define dwc:Tree and dwc:Apple and if 
anybody cares, you can try to explain how the apple is connected to the 
tree.  As I said, I could probably write RDF examples to demonstrate 
this more concretely, but I don't have time now because I'm so far 
behind on other tasks.

Steve

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

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