[tcs-lc] Have your cake and eat it?

[Roger Hyam]

Richard Pyle wrote:

>>Would be grateful for peoples thoughts.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm not sure of the implications of doing away with the Concept "type"
>attribute in TCS -- that's a question for Jessie.  But as for your proposal,
>I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  Would all propertes of a name
>object (which may be spread out over multiple publications -- such as
>leptotypification, secondary homonyms, etc., etc.) be incapsulated in one
>instance?  Or would they be assumbled from a set of instances (each with
>their own AccordingTo)?
>
>  
>
The attribute would be in the Taxon element so would apply to that Taxon 
instance in the schema. We are talking about a transport schema not a 
database model so your question is difficult to answer. Within your db 
you may have a whole load of objects representing nomenclatural facts 
associated with a name. In response to a query you could include all 
these within a single object or not depending on the query I suppose.

>Parts of what you describe sound very similar to one of the versions of the
>Nominal Concept schema I proposed (not one of the ones I spent a lot of time
>following up on). 
>
That is because all of these schemas are beginning to converge. We are 
nearing a singularity? "Great minds think alike - but fools seldom differ".

> What I was striving for is a single instance (record)
>that would contain all of the relevant elements for a single name GUID
>(whatever that ends up applying to, regarding the current conversation).  If
>I read you correctly, you would treat all the Name/AccordingTo records the
>same as TCS currently does, but flag the subset that contain nomenclatural
>acts.  Is that right?  If so, then the properties of a single Name object
>(single name GUID instance) may be spread over multiple Concept
>(Name/AccordingTo) instances -- which is what I was trying to avoid in teh
>first place.
>  
>
They may be spread or not. That depends on how you use the schema. There 
will be millions of instances of these things moving between dbs. They 
are ephemeral. It is not a database model.

>Incidentally, I was also going to propose the "Taxa/Taxon" semantics to
>replace the existing "TaxonConcepts/TaxonConcept" in TCS -- but decided not
>to primarily because it would be the only violation of the otherwise
>consistent pattern (and stated rule) that an instance container is the the
>same name as the set container, minus the "s".
>  
>
I don't think 'taxons' would go down well although I use schemas quite a 
bit :)

All the best from Malta,

Roger


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