OccurrenceRecordLsidVoc

This is a summary of the LSID Vocabulary for OccurrenceRecord?. Read LsidVocs information on LSID Vocabularies in general.

Resources

Deployments

• not yet!

Further Information

OccurrenceRecords? are linked to surrounding objects as illustrated in this rough UML diagram.

Surely people identify specimens not occurrence records?

An expert working in a biological collection is superficially looking at specimens and putting names on them but they are actually generating hypotheses that the thing this specimen was taken from was an instance of a particular taxon that occurred in a particular place at a particular time.

• The physical specimen in question may have multiple organisms present on it and give rise to multiple occurrence records.
• The specimen may consist of a blood or tissue sample and is not therefore an instance of the organism.
• The determination process may be destructive.
• The specimen may be derived from the organism in the wild (an imprint in rock or a photograph).
• It may be an n'th generation culture of the original sample.
• It may be the entire organism.
• The occurrence of a taxon may only be hypothesized from evidence in two specimens. Fertile material may be gathered at one time of year and vegetative material at another.
• It may be indicative of the absence of an organism (e.g. the lack of a parasite) - though this might be contentious.

Usage for surveying

There are two possible approaches to using OccurrenceRecord? may be used to communicate the results of a survey.

• The procedure points to the survey procedure. The hasVoucher points to the notebook or other object that the occurrence is original recorded in.
• The procedure points to a single survey instance.

Usage for specimens view.

The OccurrenceRecord? can be embedded within or linked to from a Specimen record. So a request for a specimen can include its associated OccurrenceRecord?.

Discussion

Visiting the first link under Resources above with a modern web browser will display the documentation for the vocabulary. Please read this first. If you then have any discussion points or questions please add them below.

• Identification: Roger says above: "Surely people identify specimens not occurrence records?". But field observations that result in no collection event still require identification and produce an OccurrenceRecord?. -- BobMorris - 27 May 2007

• hasVoucher: the observation community and others accept electronic vouchers, such as images, video and sounds. This doesn't seem to be accomodated in the UML. -- BobMorris - 27 May 2007

• Locality: the OWL and the XSD seem to support both geocoded and textual locality. However, if I read them correctly, the OWL and XSD for SpecimenLsidVoc seem to support only geocoding. IMO both should support either. But in any case, there is a data integrity issue caused by hasVoucher if an OccurrenceRecord? OR hasVoucher Specimen S and OR and S have inconsistent locality data. -- BobMorris - 27 May 2007

• LsidVocs
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• LsidVocsIndex
• LsidVocsTapir
• SpecimenLsidVoc
• TaxonOccurrenceLsidVoc
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