[tdwg-content] use of the terms dcterms:rightsHolder and dcterms:accessRights in existing databases

Paul J. Morris mole at morris.net
Tue Jun 26 17:32:42 CEST 2012


On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:18:41 -0300
John Wieczorek <tuco at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Interesting question. Among the VertNet data publishers (85
> institutions, 195 collections so far), none of them track or publish
> this information at the level of individual records, 

The MCZ is using dcterms:rightsHolder as a record level term in the data it is providing through IPT, as well as the related EML terms in the metadata document.

> but rather as
> information at the level of the metadata for entire collections. Using
> Darwin Core Archives, this information would be in the EML metadata
> document.
> 
> The interesting part is that the collection metadata is disjunct from
> the primary data unless someone specifically does something to remedy
> the situation. 

A requirement that the management/lawyers at ANSP imposed about a decade or so ago was that any electronic presentation of search results from the Academy's database include a terms and conditions statement.  This fed into a requirement on the development of the OBIS DarwinCore schema for a terms and conditions element (which we populated with a link to the terms and conditions document on the Academy's website).  Given that technology, this was the only way to ensure that any given search result contained the relevant metadata, and provided for the potential for upstream aggregators to pass the metadata along with records that had orginated from ANSP.  

> No occurrence record knows what its rightsHolder and
> accessRights are. So, when they go into the wild mixed with records
> from other institutions, that information is effectively lost. It
> would be better if it was not lost. One way to do this in conventional
> publishing using Darwin Core Archives would be to generate the
> record-level metadata from the collection-level metadata during the
> publishing process. That's what we are doing in VertNet as we
> transition from DiGIR providers to Darwin Core Archives.

That's a nice approach, as long as the EML terms map in sensible ways into the record level terms.  


-Paul
 
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Steve Baskauf
> <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> > The terms dcterms:rightsHolder and dcterms:accessRights are
> > "imported" from Dublin Core into the Darwin Core record-level
> > vocabulary.  I am interested in them for two reasons: there are
> > several issues with the use of those terms as RDF predicates, and
> > they differ from the terms suggested for use in rights management
> > in the draft Audubon Core vocabulary.  What I am wondering is how
> > widely are they actually used in databases by our community?  If
> > you maintain a database, do you use them?
> >
> > Steve
> >
> > --
> > Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
> > Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
> >
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> > Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.
> >
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> >
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> >
> >
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-- 
Paul J. Morris
Biodiversity Informatics Manager
Harvard University Herbaria/Museum of Comparative Zoölogy
mole at morris.net  AA3SD  PGP public key available


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