Guidelines for grouping fossil specimens into organisms.

[dennereed]

Darwin Core is generally setup to record whole organisms, whereas the most common paleobiology use cases include portions of organisms. The Organism class could serve as a grouping factor that indicates when multiple fossils belong to the same organism. Is this a suitable best practice recommendation for paleobiology.
Furthermore, is there a controlled vocabulary to recommend for organismScope? What is recommended best practice in paleobiology for use of organismID vs associatedOccurrences?

[dennereed]

Merging this thread with #17
The individualCount, organismQuantity and organismQuantityType terms are designed to track the number of individual organisms in an occurrence measured as specimens, biomass etc. How does this translate to paleontology? Comparable concepts in paleobiology are Number of Identified Specimens (NISP) and Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI). Is there an available vocabulary for these terms? What should be our recommendation?

[hollyel]

Also see discussion happening here tdwg/dwc#185