[tdwg-content] why is relationshipOfResource defined as the inverse of what one would expect?

[Hilmar Lapp]

Among the ResourceRelationship terms in DwC, we have the following key
properties denoting subject and object of the asserted relationship:

resourceID - "An identifier for the resource that is the subject of the
relationship."
relatedResourceID - "An identifier for a related resource (the object,
rather than the subject of the relationship)."

Then there is relationshipOfResource, which oddly and confusingly is
defined as the inverse of a property relating subject to object:

"The relationship of the resource identified by relatedResourceID to the
subject (optionally identified by the resourceID)."

The comment gives examples that do nothing to suggest that the definition
has this backwards, or to disambiguate:
"Examples: "duplicate of", "mother of", "endoparasite of", "host to",
"sibling of", "valid synonym of", "located within"."

The corresponding wiki page does not offer further clarification:
https://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/ResourceRelationship

There is also a page on the TDWG-RDF wiki (which declares itself as
obsolete, yet links to itself for further information):
https://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/ResourceRelationship

The example on this page (Table 1) seems to assume (or is fooled or
confused into thinking) that relationshipOfResource is not relating object
to subject, but as one would expect subject to object.

So is the definition wrong? And if it's not, why was the relationship
chosen to point in the inverse direction of what one would expect?

   -hilmar

-- 
Hilmar Lapp -:- informatics.nescent.org/wiki -:- lappland.io
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