[tdwg-content] Purpose of ResourceRelationship

[Richard Pyle]

On a separate but related issue, I don't think I ever received any feedback
on my question some months back regarding the scope of function of the
ResourceRelationship class in DwC.

I suspect that hardly anyone is using it, and I get the sense that most
people assume that it is intended to allow cross-linking instances of DwC
classes with objects external to DwC-class items.

However, in my mind it serves as the *perfect* mechanism to cross-link
instances of DwC classes to each other (e.g., an Occurrence to an Event; an
Identification to a Taxon and Organism; a Location to an Event; etc., etc.).
It also seems to me to be the perfect mechanism to represent recursive links
within a Class.  It's this last bit that John's recent email reminded me of.

To wit:

> Term Name: associatedOrganisms
> Identifier:     http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/associatedOrganisms
> Namespace:      http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/
> Label:  associatedOrganisms
> Definition:     A list (concatenated and separated) of identifiers of
> other Organism records and their associations to this Organism.
> Comment:        Example: "sibling of MXA-231; sibling of MXA-232". 

... as well as associatedOccurrences, associatedTaxa, and possibly other
"associated[xxxxx]" terms...

Shouldn't these "associations" among instances between and within DwC
classes be represented as series of ResourceRelationship instances?  Is this
not the intended purpose for ResourceRelationship?  Or, is it the intended
purposes, but the various "associated[xxxx]" terms are there in order to
provide a "flattened" or "denormalized" concatenation of identifiers?

Aloha,
Rich