[tcs-lc] difference between IsParentOf/IsChildOf; and Includes/IsIncludedIn RelationshipTypes?

Richard Pyle deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
Thu Sep 22 11:33:32 PDT 2005


> It's the last or... I think
> When it comes to concepts there will be many concepts that some people
> think are well defined (or defined enough for their purposes) that
> others may find inadequate I believe. So your "This genus SEC me" may
> only be defined by the fact that you have a has child "T. thisspecies
> SEC me" - that doesn't mean it's a nominal concept just a poorly defined
> one that others may choose to use or not.

O.K., that's good to know. But...the logical conseqence of this is that in
any case where some publication definies a TaxonConcept for a lower-rank
name (e.g., species), there are implied concept definitions for every
higher-rank name in the hierarchy as provided in the publication--no matter
how poorly-defined those TaxonConcepts for higher-rank names are.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy with this, because I lean more towards the
"potential taxon" end of the spectrum when deciding which Name-usage
instances rise to the level of "TaxonConcept", and which do not.

On the other hand....I suppose it's also possible that the Parent/Child link
between a well-defined species concept and a poorly-defined genus concept
could be established via a RelationshipAssertion (which, Iif I remember
correctly, is allowed for within-AccordingTo relationships).  But that's
sort of messy if someone wants to create a simple nomenclatural hierarchy
from such a dataset.

> In my opinion Nominal concepts should have no relationships to other
> concepts except the implicit (possible implemented explicitly)
> relationships to all concepts (from the best to the poorest defined)
> that share the same TaxonName object.

I COMPLETELY agree!!

Aloha,
Rich




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