<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Joel,<div><br></div><div>Thanks for taking the time to summarise this. A few comments inline:</div><div><br><div><div>On Oct 11, 2010, at 1:46 PM, joel sachs wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>One of the goals of the recent bioblitz was to think about the suitability <br>and appropriatness of TDWG standards for citizen science. Robert Stevenson <br>has volunteered to take the lead on preparing a technobioblitz lessons <br>learned document, and though the scope of this document is not yet <br>determined, I think the audience will include bioblitz organizers, <br>software developers, and TDWG as a whole. I hope no one is shy about <br>sharing lessons they think they learned, or suggestions that they have. We <br>can use the bioblitz google group for this discussion, and copy in <br>tdwg-content when our discussion is standards-specific.<br><br>Here are some of my immediate observations:<br><br>1. Darwin Core is almost exactly right for citizen science. However, there <br>is a desperate need for examples and templates of its use. To illustrate <br>this need: one of the developers spoke of the design choice between "a <br>simple csv file and a Darwin Core record". But a simple csv file is a <br>legitimate representation of Darwin Core! To be fair to the developer, <br>such a sentence might not have struck me as absurd a year ago, before <br>Remsen said "let's use DwC for the bioblitz".<br><br>We provided a couple of example DwC records (text and rdf) in the bioblitz <br>data profile [1]. I think the lessons learned document should include an <br>on-line catalog of cut-and-pasteable examples covering a variety of use <br>cases, together with a dead simple desciption of DwC, something like <br>"Darwin Core is a collection of terms, together with definitions."<br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><br>Here are areas where we augemented or diverged from DwC in the bioblitz:<br><br>i. We added obs:observedBy [2], since there is no equivalent property in <br>DwC, and it's important in Citizen Science (though often not available).<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Is this not the intention of recordedBy?</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/#recordedBy">http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/#recordedBy</a></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, 'Arial Unicode MS', Helvetica, sans-serif; border-collapse: collapse; font-size: small; ">A list (concatenated and separated) of names of people, groups, or organizations responsible for recording the original Occurrence. The primary collector or observer, especially one who applies a personal identifier (recordNumber), should be listed first.</span></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>ii. We used geo:lat and geo:long [3] instead of DwC terms for latitude and <br>longitude. The geo namespace is a well used and supported standard, and <br>records with geo coordinates are automatically mapped by several <br>applications.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Keeping an inventory of applications somewhere might be worthwhile to help promote or decide on this.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div> Since everyone was using GPS to retrieve their coordinates, <br>we were able to assume WGS-84 as the datum.<br><br>If someone had used another Datum, say XYZ, we would have added columns to <br>the Fusion table so that they could have expressed their coordiantes in <br>DwC, as, e.g.:<br>DwC:decimalLatitude=41.5<br>DwC:decimalLongitude=-70.7<br>DwC:geodeticDatum=XYZ<br><br>(I would argue that it should be kosher DwC to express the above as simply <br>XYZ:lat and XYZ:long. DwC already incorporates terms from other <br>namespaces, such as Dublin Core, so there is precedent for this.<br><br>2. DwC:scientificName might be more user friendly than taxonomy:binomial <br>and the other taxonomy machine tags EOL uses for flickr images. If <br>DwC:scientificName isn't self-explanatory enough, a user can look it up, <br>and see that any scientific name is acceptable, at any taxonomic rank, or <br>not having any rank. And once we have a scientific name, higher ranks can <br>be inferred.<br><br>3. Catalogue of Life was an important part of the workflow, but we <br>had some problems with it. Future bioblitzes might consider using <br>something like a CoL fork, as recently described by Rod Page [4].<br><br>4. We didn't include "basisOfRecord" in the original data profile, and so <br>it wasn't a column in the Fusion Table [5]. But when a transcriber felt it <br>was necessary to include in order to capture data in a particular field <br>sheet, she just added the column to the table. This flexibility of schema <br>is important, and is in harmony with the semantic web.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>For citizen science, would it not make more sense to apply some easy guideline to select one of:</div><div>- <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">HumanObservation</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">- </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">PreservedSpecimen</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">- </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">LivingSpecimen</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">(<a href="http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/RecordLevelTerms">http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/RecordLevelTerms</a>)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; "><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">Basis of record is one of the fundamental fields to know when consuming content, so I think any effort to capture that at source will be worthwhile in the long run.</span></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>5. There seemed to be enthusiasm for another field event at next year's <br>TDWG. This could be an opportunity to gather other types of data (eg. <br>character data) and thereby <br>i) expose meeting particpants to another set of everyday problems from the <br>world of biodiversity workflows, and ii) try other TDWG technology on <br>for size, e.g. the observation exchange format, annotation framework, etc.<br><br><br>Happy Thanksgiving to all in Canada -<br>Joel.<br>----<br><br><br>1. <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/tdwg-bioblitz/web/tdwg-bioblitz-profile-v1-1">http://groups.google.com/group/tdwg-bioblitz/web/tdwg-bioblitz-profile-v1-1</a><br>2. Slightly bastardizing our old observation ontology - <br><a href="http://spire.umbc.edu/ontologies/Observation.owl">http://spire.umbc.edu/ontologies/Observation.owl</a><br>3. http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/<br>4. http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/10/replicating-and-forking-data-in-2010.html<br>5. http://tables.googlelabs.com/DataSource?dsrcid=248798<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>tdwg-content mailing list<br>tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org<br>http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>