search

tdwg / ac

Audiovisual Core
http://www.tdwg.org/standards/638
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
11 stars 6 forks source link

Proposal to import term dwc:individualCount #176

Open danstowell opened 3 years ago

danstowell commented 3 years ago

Term Name: dwc:individualCount

Imported from: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/individualCount

Type: rdf:Property

Label: Individual Count

Required: No

Repeatable: No

Definition: The number of individuals represented present at the time of the Occurrence.

Usage: Numeric number of individuals

Justification for the term addition: The behaviour of individuals may be affected by the number of individuals present (e.g. chorusing). For analysis of bioacoustic traits, recordings of a single individual are often required, rather than a group with overlapping songs.

Proposed by myself and @edwbaker

baskaufs commented 3 years ago

Minor edit: correct rdfs:Property to rdf:Property

dbloom commented 3 years ago

Per my comments during the AC Maintenance Group at TDWG:

Please be careful with the definition of dwc:individualCount. The complete definition is “The number of individuals represented present at the time of the Occurrence.” This is important because the number of individuals present at the time of the occurrence may be different than the number of individuals retained by a given collection or represented on a recording.

danstowell commented 3 years ago

Another comment thanks to Mary Kennedy: "perhaps instead or in addition to number of individuals one could provide organismScope - this could then refer to a pack (of wolves) or a pod (of whales) or a flock (of birds), etc"

danstowell commented 3 years ago

@dbloom that's a good point. It seems to me there's a problem: the definition is not grammatical, so I don't know how to interpret "represented present". Does it mean "represented and present" or does it mean "represented/present"? See https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/285 where I request clarified wording.

edwbaker commented 3 years ago

I think individualCount (subject to clarification) covers neatly the case of laboratory recordings.

organismScope seems to neatly cover a lot of cases where there is an obvious social structure (e.g. flock). I'm not sure it covers cases where there is a chorus (whether the behaviour is structured or unstructured) but there is no obvious social structure (e.g. a field of crickets, a swamp of frogs).

Perhaps import both, and expand the guidance of organismScope to allow for "chorus" or equivalent to representing an indeterminate number of individuals?

edwbaker commented 4 months ago

Following discussion at the 2024 Working Group meeting, individualCount will be proposed at the next opportunity, with organismScope reserved for later discussion at an MG meeting.

tucotuco commented 4 months ago

Are you sure you don't want to consider the more expressive and explicit combination of dwc:organismQuantity and dwc:organismQuantityType? There was once an attempt to deprecate dwc:individualCount in favor of this combination, but consensus could not be reached to dispense with dwc:individualCount despite the fact the the new combination completely supersedes it.

edwbaker commented 4 months ago

"Are you sure" - no.

I will delay this one until the Maintenance Group can discuss it more thoroughly.