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

Thu Oct 21 05:09:13 CEST 2010

I would have to think about the specific details Bob brings up, but he
mentions the kinds of issues that I think are being overlooked.

What might make sense when mapped to a relational table (XMLish), might not
make sense when represented as triples.

- Pete

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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:
> > VU Station B 351634
> > Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.
> >
> > delivery address:
> > 2125 Stevenson Center
> > 1161 21st Ave., S.
> > Nashville, TN 37235
> >
> > office: 2128 Stevenson Center
> > phone: (615) 343-4582,  fax: (615) 343-6707
> > http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > tdwg-content mailing list
> > tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> > http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> 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)
> _______________________________________________
> tdwg-content mailing list
> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
TaxonConcept Knowledge Base <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> / GeoSpecies
Knowledge Base <http://lod.geospecies.org/>
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://about.geospecies.org/>
------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20101020/50b05f0d/attachment-0001.html 