DwC terms not used directly in DwC-DP: ResourceRelationship

[tucotuco]

Like Simple Darwin Core, DwC-DP defines a class for user-defined relationships between instances of classes, though it is called Relationship rather than dwc:ResourceRelationship. The Relationship class has all of the functionality of the dwc:ResourceRelationship class, however, because relationships are defined at the record level and not at the class level (the foreign keys are polymorphic), Relationship records can not be validated by standard Data Package tools. As such, the Relationship class is very much a way for data publishers to share related information that is not supported by the existing semantics of DwC-DP, which are based on a wide variety of common use cases. If you find that your data publishing use case can only be supported by using the Relationship class, it is a good indicator that the DwC-DP model should be adapted to support that use case directly in a way that can be validated rather than to rely on the "wide open" Relationship class.