[Tcs-lc] Human Readable - the thread formally known as 'Name of NomenCode'

[Robert K. Peet]

Here is my take.

> I am working with Jessie and Robert on the schema at the moment and hope
> to get fancier pointers in there. They make sense to me.  I hope we can
> have something to throw open for discussion in the next couple of days.
>
> I am just trying to generate an instance document for a couple of
> species by hand at the moment and I am getting very confused.
>
> What is the relationship type between a species and it's genus? Is it
> 'included in' or 'child of' and would the user agent expect the
> reciprocal relationships to be marked up i.e. 'includes' and 'is parent
> of'?

Parent/child refers to hierarchical relations, and included/includes
refers to set relationships. To say 'child of' also implies 'included in'
but the 'included in' need not be explicitely stated.

As a general rule I would define only 'child of' relationships, and would
point to the next known level up; 'parent of' relationships could then be
inferred.  Use of explicit 'parent of' relationships is rather ambiguous
in that one does not know how to interpret the implications of a missing
'child of'.

> Would all software agents:

I think the point of the design is to say as little as possible about
'all software agents' so as to allow many potential applications.  We
should not artificially constrain the users.

>    1. expect only up pointing links.
>    2. expect only down pointing links.
>    3. expect both to be present for the link to be valid.
>    4. allow the use of a mixture of the two, relationship sometime shown
>       with 'includes' and sometimes with 'included in'.
>
> I define relationships between a species concept and it's genus concept
> but what about the subgenus and sectional stuff?
> I could:
>
>    1. mark the species as belonging to the section and section to
>       subgenus and subgenus to genus and not specify any other relationships

1. seems sufficient for most purposes

>    2.  join the species to section, subgenus and genus as well as
>       joining up the section to subgenus and genus and subgenus to
>       genus. i.e. all the includes relationships.
>    3. do a mixture of the two. Species always in genus but other things not.
>
> Confused? I am and I am just doing this manually! I find the thought of
> writing software to consume this more scary than handling the links to
> the publications and specimens. Even if we define how these
> relationships should be encoded there is no way for the schema to
> validate it so we will have to write checking code and try and handle
> graceful degradation etc. I think we need to nail this thing down a bit
> - there should only really be one way of encoding a basic taxonomic
> hierarchy and that should be enforced by the schema I think. What do you
> all think?

There should be a difference between 'best practice' and other odd uses we
have not yet identified.  If we all used the same data model and data
structure life would be much easier and TCS much simpler, but we don't.

> Has anyone generated instances of recent versions of the TCS (0.9+)
> using real data? If so could they send me one.

We should have a couple datasets of this sort.  I will check and try to
get back to you by email.

Bob Peet