How species interactions are managed in Plinian Core: Status and questions

Abstract

Plinian Core is a set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe all kind of properties related to taxa (https://github.com/tdwg/PlinianCore). "Interactions" is a class of properties included in the "Natural History" class. In its current state, the class comprises the elements taken from the Darwin Core class "ResourceRelationship", these are: resourceRelationshipID, resourceID, relatedResourceID, relationshipOfResource, relationshipAccordingTo, relationshipEstablishedDate, relationshipRemarks These terms are complemented with a Plinian Core native element: InteractionSpeciesType (see https://github.com/tdwg/PlinianCore/wiki/InteractionAtomizedClass), intended to group all possible interactions into logical categories. As a generic standard, Plinian Core recommends but does not impose the use of controlled vocabularies to specify interactions and their types. However, the community would benefit enormously from having some consensus vocabularies to recommend for interactions and categories of interactions. That is --as we see it-- the frontier in managing species interaction information. We will review some of the investigations on this subject within the scope of Plinian Core.