[tdwg-content] practical details of recording a determination What is an Occurrence?

[Bob Morris]

Sticking my head up with a few suggestions

1. (Social) I've only been a lurker in this historically long thread
since all my formal Biology training came from Mr. Siegler at Red
Bank, NJ High School in 1957.  But I have noticed that
dwc:establishmentMeans sounds like something for which I recall that
the Invasive Species informatics community requires a fairly
fine-grained vocabulary.  Yet I've only noticed one participant (Jerry
Cooper) who I recognize travels in that community. (But I don't know
all the participants). TDWG in general, but perhaps not this list in
particular, has increasingly strong connections to the Invasive
Species world, but their use-cases will still need to be aggressively
sought.

2. (Technical). The conversation often has words like "attribute"
"class" and RDF in the same sentence. In my experience, when people
begin to formalize this constellation using the RDF stack, the first
thing they do is translate ER-like diagrams into triples that look,
for example, like
    dwc:establishmentMeans rdfs:domain dwc:Individual
IMO, this should not be done lightly, because in rdf it would entail
that should someone choose to apply dwc:establishmentMeans to, say a
pqr:Population object P, then that pqr:Population P would necessarily
be a dwc:Individual, which sounds naughty to me.  It may well be that
the intent is that dwc:establishmentMeans is meant to apply only to
Individuals (though in my naiveté that would surprise me) but such
decisions should not be taken lightly if there is any desire to have
RDF as a basis for logical reasoning about Life, the Universe, and
Everything---or at least about Life. Informal narrative like "move
dwc:establishmentMeans to the proposed Individual class" could dig
itself into the rdfs:domain hole...

--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
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)



On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Steve Baskauf
<steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> Well, I also feel pretty good about most of that diagram, but I'm still
> struggling with the whole "token" thing.  I feel the need to discuss
> basisOfRecord=LivingSpecimen which is the most complicated case and is also
> related to the previous discussion about dwc:establishmentMeans as well as
> my proposal to move it to the proposed Individual class.  It is also related
> to another issue that I haven't broached here but which is discussed in my
> paper - "Occurrences" that aren't directly derived from an individual.  I'm
> beginning to think that part of what I wrote there (in the paper) was wrong,
> but I'm not sure what the alternative is.  That issue will probably come up
> if I comment about what Cam wrote in his email.  So there may be more to
> hash out, but I can't handle it today because I've got too many other things
> to do.  I've been mentally composing what I hope is a lucid presentation,
> but it hasn't hit the keyboard yet.
>
> Steve
>
> I have to say, this has been about the most productive (if volumunous)
> list-discussion I've had in...well...maybe ever.  It seems we've both been
> equally persuasive, and equally willing to concede.  How rare that happens
> in an internet forum!  I'm not sure there's anything left that we disagee
> about.  If the "diagram1" seems to resonate with everyone as the most
> "normalized" ER diagram we'll likely ever need, and if we can somehow
> accommodate flexibility in RDF for collapsing attributes to different
> classes (but only from the "one" side to the "many" side) -- then we might
> have achived the elusive Holy Grail of biodiversity informatics: true
> consensus.
>
>
>
> Thanks for your great feedback and for challenging my statements.  I need
>
>
> that!
>
> Likewise!	
>
> Aloha,
> Rich
>
>
> .
>
>
>
> --
> Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
> Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
>
> postal mail address:
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>



-- 
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
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)