We should like to know what are the different practices that nodes or data managers have with regard of this two “similar” darwinCore terms.
Our understanding is that associatedOccurrences applies when you have a relationship between two records that belongs to separated taxonomic groups, for example a host (mammal) and a parasite (bacteria), we also recommend using this field together with associatedTaxa, where you can put the nature of the relationship.
Meanwhile, associatedOrganisms applies when you have a relationship between two records that belongs to the same taxonomic group, for example a mother-son or a pack of animals recorded together.
We hope to open a discussion about the good practices documenting this fields and have several points of view, so we can do better recommendations to our data publishers.
As an addendum, we have somehow a similar situation with individualCount and organismQuantity, we use the former only when all the records belongs to individuals and the later when there are different types in the same dataset (e.g. %biomass, cel/ml, individuals, etc). But we want to be sure we are doing properly.
Thanks in advance for your answers.