How to represent histopatologic sections in a Event core DwC text?

[ghost]

I'm very new to Darwin Core, so I apologize for the noobness of this question.

My goal is to represent a histopathological study of fishes in a Darwin Core text format. It would be important to show a sum of things like:

• the sampling event (core),
• the fish occurrences,
• their extracted organs,
• histological sections of these organs (microscope slides) and
• whether or not these sections showed lesions and what type.

Would it be possible to represent so much levels of information like this? Thanks for helping!

[baskaufs]

Because most Darwin Core datasets don't include this many levels of derived resources, typical Darwin Core implementations can't handle situations like this. For example, Darwin Core Archives (with their "star schema" setup) can really only handle one or maybe two links between resource types.

When you start getting into situations such as you describe above, you are kind of getting into Linked Data territory. There have been some attempts to express Darwin Core as Linked Data, but so far none have made it to the level of acceptance of becoming part of the standard. I've played around with trying to use Darwin Core in situations like this by creating Linked Data datasets. You can read about one of my attempts in this blog post. The section called "Occurrence core with Amplification, Loan, MaterialSample, Permit, Preparation, and ResourceRelationship extensions" is probably the most similar to your example above.