This thread can be used to discuss and provide feedback to the use case on Find Tissue Samples.
As the TDWG OSR-Material Sample Task Group is looking at controlled vocabulary to describe dwc:MaterialSample, this is at the top of my mind, especially given the needs of data users such as GGBN and the upcoming increase in environmental samples and eDNA.
Does “find tissue samples” mean “find things specifically preserved as ‘tissue’ meant for molecular analysis”? Or does it mean “find me anything that might be used for molecular analysis”?
Nobody likes it, but I think “finding tissue” is a relative term and means different things to different people. I also think that “finding tissue” probably needs something more than searching a single term somewhere. It involves a complex search of material, preparation, and preservation at the very least.
As a community, Arctos has failed to get “tissue” in a single field. Some insist that the material is more important, so we have parts like “heart, liver, muscle” which doesn’t directly indicate “tissue”:
https://arctos.database.museum/guid/MSB:Herp:105008
and we have the part “tissue” where the material is described in the tissue remark:
https://arctos.database.museum/guid/MVZ:Bird:177767
which makes it impossible to find all “muscle tissue” with a single search. We are not a huge community, but we have yet to get everyone on the same page with regard to “tissue”. But to be fair, part of the problem is the plasticity of the term “tissue” and the fact that some end users expect to be able to find all “whatever their definition of tissue is” with a single term search.
Maybe those examples can be the start of a use case?