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gbif / occurrence

Occurrence store, download, search
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Allow duplciate occurrences in Checklists #80

Open mdoering opened 5 years ago

mdoering commented 5 years ago

If occurrences are indexed as extension records in a Taxon core checklist it should be legal to share the same occurrence multiple times. E.g. a specimen might be associated with 2 taxa and the dwca star schema forces one to replicate the occurrence record.

For Occurrence indexing this means occurrenceID might not be unique!

Right now this is probably hypothetical, but Plazi is discussing such cases.

myrmoteras commented 5 years ago

The point is not that the taxon is associated with two or more taxa (which it could, if synonymy or misidentifications are considered), but whether the same specimen can be in multiple checklists (publications in the sense of Plazi).

In my view, this is reality and we need to allow this. It also reflects the growth of knowledge of a particular specimen and related taxon respectively.

This is a discussion topic in DiSSCo when they talk about the digital specimen objects, that is an umbrella for all the data known about a specimen.

image (Hardisty)

mdoering commented 5 years ago

The point here is the required uniqueness of occurrenceID for all occurrence records within a GBIF dataset. The specimen centric DiSSCo view is interesting, similar to the Occurrence evidence ideas in TDWG just inverted. Can't find any reference ad hoc, but the Darwin-SW ontology has the idea covered.