Hi Aaike,
The institutionID is definitely meant to be a GUID, and as such would not likely be of much use within an institutional database, where the institutionID would likely be the same for every record. Instead, it is meant to identify an institution in a persistent, hopefully resolvable way, where resolution would be able to give more information about the identified institution.
Identifiers for institutions do exist. An example is urn:lsid:biocol.org:col:34777, the institutionID in the Biodiversity Collections Index for the University of California Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), within which there are several collections, each with its distinct collectionID, such as urn:lsid:biocol.org:col:34818 for the Herpetology Collection at the MVZ.
The IDs are useful to provide the possibility of a link to other information that may not be shared in original record. They are also useful to distinguish the institutions and collections from each other. For example, MVZ is the acronym used for the Institution as a whole where the collections are housed, and it is also used independently by each of the collections when specimens are cited in literature. In other words, the institutionCode (MVZ) is not distinct from the collectionCodes (MVZ), and the collectionCodes within the institution are not unique (all MVZ). The IDs are meant to overcome this and other problems of reference and uniqueness.
I hope that helps,
John
On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 7:03 AM, Aaike De Wever aaike.dewever@naturalsciences.be wrote:
Dear all,
While composing a template and recommendations for the Darwin Core fields to supply for the BioFresh project http://www.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu/, similar to what Peter Desmet did for herbaria in Apple Core http://code.google.com/p/applecore/, I came across a number of terms which I haven't yet completely understood and hope to get some feedback on from this community.
Two of these terms are:
InstitutionCode - InstitutionID http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/institutionCode - http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/institutionID
The name (or acronym) in use by the institution having custody of the object(s) or information referred to in the record. / An identifier for the institution having custody of the object(s) or information referred to in the record.
I guess that the latter term is supposed to be a DOI/GUID for the institute, but am wondering if there is such a thing or whether this field is rather for internal database purposes?
Any advise would be appreciated!
With best regards,
Aaike De Wever BioFresh Science Officer Freshwater Laboratory, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences Vautierstraat 29, 1000 Brussels Belgium tel.: +32(0)2 627 43 90 mobile.: +32(0)486 28 05 93 email: aaike.dewever@naturalsciences.be skype: aaikew AIM: aaike@mac.com LinkedIn: http://be.linkedin.com/in/aaikedewever BioFresh: http://www.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu/ and http://data.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu/ Belgian Biodiversity Platform: http://www.biodiversity.be
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