[tdwg-content] Treatise on Occurrence, tokens, and basisOfRecord

[Peter DeVries]

As shown in this RDF

http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC.rdf

<http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC.rdf>All the occurrences of this
species will have this "type"

http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Occurrence

<http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Occurrence>All the individuals of
this species will have this "type"

http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Individual

<http://lod.taxonconcept.org/ses/ICmLC#Individual>Which then makes it easy
to query for all occurrence or all individuals of this species concept.

The exact predicate is different but when you tie a subject to and object
you are essentially making the subject a "type" of the object.

Which is why you can see the occurrences for that species in the
triplestore, when you ask it to describe that type.

<
http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flod.taxonconcept.org%2Fses%2FICmLC%23Occurrence&sid=16&urilookup=1
 >

- Pete

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Hilmar Lapp <hlapp at nescent.org> wrote:

>
> On Oct 25, 2010, at 4:37 AM, Cam Webb wrote:
>
> > But then what exactly are the Occurrences themselves?  From Richard
> > Pyle:
> >
> >   ``So, an Occurrence is the intersection of an Individual and an
> > Event.
> >   An Event is a Location+Time[+other metadata].  Each Event may have
> >   multiple Occurrences (i.e., one for each distinct Individual at
> > the same
> >   Location+Time).  Also, an Individual may have multiple Occurrences
> > (one
> >   for each Event at which the same Individual was documented).''
> >
> > So the Occurrence is the Individual _itself_ bounded by space and
> > time,
>
>
> While for the purposes of exchanging occurrence data in a commonly
> agreed upon markup, i.e., Darwin Core, this may be perfectly
> acceptable, I think there are some serious issues in the above when we
> try to tighten up the semantics so that machines could do something
> with them, or so they can seamlessly integrate into the semantic web.
>
> First there is an internal inconsistency: on the one hand occurrences
> *are* individuals (albeit only a subset - though see below), and on
> the other hand individuals *have* occurrences.
>
> Second, occurrence is said to be the intersection of an individual and
> an event, or an individual and space and time. In the semantic web,
> OWL models deal with sets of individuals. I would argue that the
> intersection set of an individual organism (or a set of individual
> organisms) and an event (or a set of events) is empty, because there
> are no events that are also individual organisms, and vice versa.
>
> Alternatively, and using "Individuals" as short hand for "instances of
> an organism" we could say that an Occurrence is the intersection of
> all Individuals belonging to a specific taxon, all Individuals at a
> specific location, and all Individuals existing at a specific time.
> Then an instance of an Occurrence would be an Individual in that
> intersection, and taxon, location, and time would be (among) its
> properties.
>
> Just some thoughts.
>
>        -hilmar
> --
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
> ===========================================================
>
>
>
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>



-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
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/>
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