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

[joel sachs]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Arlin Stoltzfus wrote:

> On Oct 28, 2010, at 11:58 AM, joel sachs wrote:
>
>> Hey Rich, Hilmar, Paul, and everyone -
>>
>> I liked the definition from a couple of weeks ago:
>>
>> "An occurrence is a tuple consiting of time, place, individual, and
>> some
>> optional properties."
>>
>> What's that lacking?
>
>
> Nothing, but the form of "occurrence" as a 3-way relation between a
> thing, a place and a time might be less amenable to formal reasoning
> than some other formulations, depending on how its rendered.

It might be. But I haven't seen any examples of the kind of reasoning that 
the alternative definitions seek to enable. Did I miss them?

> I thought that was the reason others had introduced "event" as place +
> time.   Otherwise, what is the reason for "event"?

I was wondering the same thing. Event=(Location, Time) strikes me as 
weird, for a couple of reasons:

i. Intuitively, an event is something that happens at a region of
space/time, not the region itself.

ii. More significantly, a DwC:event is a container for metadata that gets 
attached to occurrences via eventID. A DwC:event corresponds to the 
intuitive definition above, since you can have multiple DwC:events over 
the same space/time region, e.g. two groups surveying for different taxa, 
using different methodologies.

Joel.


>
> Arlin
> -------
> Arlin Stoltzfus (arlin at umd.edu)
> Fellow, IBBR; Adj. Assoc. Prof., UMCP; Research Biologist, NIST
> IBBR, 9600 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, MD
> tel: 240 314 6208; web: www.molevol.org
>
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