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Guides for standardization of Biological Interaction Data
This document provides guidelines for formatting and sharing Biological Interactions data using Darwin Core terms. Different approaches can be adopted for formatting and sharing biological interactions data (e.g. ResourceRelationship, associatedTaxa). Although, these approaches are not equivalent regarding to the type of information and details level which could be represented. Definitely, some approaches have more advantages them others, and for that reason these are the recommended ways for formatting and sharing biological interactions data.
The choose of the best approach depends on the level of details and how data is structured. The rest of this document provides a guide for choosing the appropriated approach for formatting and sharing different types of biological interactions data.
This document is targeted toward those who want to share biological interactions information. It explains the uses and limitations of different structures and how to expand upon them.
Biological interactions may be represented at two different levels of organizations: species-based view and individual-based view (see Nakazawa, 2020 for a discussion about this two different frameworks). Despite, interactions occur between individuals in real nature, traditionally many ecological studies and, consequently, many datasets provide interactions at species level. Thus, they assume that all conspecific individuals are effectively interchangeable and that the species are completely homogeneous in an interaction. But that is also not true because intraspecific variations are ubiquitous due to factors such as ontogeny, sex and genotype. The individual is the unit which allows the evaluation and the quantification of any ecological, genetic and evolutionary patterns at the population and community levels.
Despite, the recommended approach to share biological interactions is to used the individual-based view, this document also covers the species-based view for sharing historical data.
The following sections illustrate the most common use cases for the individual-based view and species-based view.
Note that the individual-based view is the recommended framework for formatting and sharing biological interactions data. Although, in those cases where the assumption of species homogeneity holds and it is impossible to document interaction at individual levels, then the species-based view should be used.
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- Event-ResourceRelationship (recommended)
- AssociatedTaxa and AssociatedOccurrences