Thanks, John.
This is useful, but completely uncontrolled – effectively a
verbatimEstablishmentMeans. Having a more controlled version or a simple
flag which could be machine-processible in those cases where providers can
supply it would be useful.
Donald
|
|
Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living
Australia CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700,
Canberra, ACT 2601 Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile:
0437990208 Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au |
From: gtuco.btuco@gmail.com
[mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com] On Behalf Of John Wieczorek
Sent: Tuesday, 12 October 2010 11:34 AM
To: Hobern, Donald (CES, Black Mountain)
Cc: jsachs@csee.umbc.edu; tdwg-bioblitz@googlegroups.com;
tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz
Natural occurrence is meant to
be captured through the term dwc:establishmentMeans (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#establishmentMeans).
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 5:16 PM,
<Donald.Hobern@csiro.au> wrote:
Thanks, Joel.
Nice summary. One addition which we do need to resolve (and which has
been suggested in recent months) is to have a flag to indicate whether a record
should be considered to show a "natural" occurrence (in distinction
from cultivation, botanic gardens, zoos, etc.). This is not so much an issue in
a BioBlitz, but is certainly a factor with citizen science recording in general
- see the number of zoo animals in the Flickr EOL group.
Donald
Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia
CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601
Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au
Web: http://www.ala.org.au/
-----Original Message-----
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org
[mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org]
On Behalf Of joel sachs
Sent: Monday, 11 October 2010 10:47 PM
To: tdwg-bioblitz@googlegroups.com;
tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: [tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz
One of the goals of the recent bioblitz was to think about the suitability and
appropriatness of TDWG standards for citizen science. Robert Stevenson has
volunteered to take the lead on preparing a technobioblitz lessons learned
document, and though the scope of this document is not yet determined, I think
the audience will include bioblitz organizers, software developers, and TDWG as
a whole. I hope no one is shy about sharing lessons they think they learned, or
suggestions that they have. We can use the bioblitz google group for this
discussion, and copy in tdwg-content when our discussion is standards-specific.
Here are some of my immediate observations:
1. Darwin Core is almost exactly right for citizen science. However, there is a
desperate need for examples and templates of its use. To illustrate this need:
one of the developers spoke of the design choice between "a simple csv
file and a Darwin Core record". But a simple csv file is a legitimate
representation of Darwin Core! To be fair to the developer, such a sentence
might not have struck me as absurd a year ago, before Remsen said "let's
use DwC for the bioblitz".
We provided a couple of example DwC records (text and rdf) in the bioblitz data
profile [1]. I think the lessons learned document should include an
on-line catalog of cut-and-pasteable examples covering a variety of use cases,
together with a dead simple desciption of DwC, something like "Darwin Core
is a collection of terms, together with definitions."
Here are areas where we augemented or diverged from DwC in the bioblitz:
i. We added obs:observedBy [2], since there is no equivalent property in DwC,
and it's important in Citizen Science (though often not available).
ii. We used geo:lat and geo:long [3] instead of DwC terms for latitude and
longitude. The geo namespace is a well used and supported standard, and records
with geo coordinates are automatically mapped by several applications. Since
everyone was using GPS to retrieve their coordinates, we were able to
assume WGS-84 as the datum.
If someone had used another Datum, say XYZ, we would have added columns to the
Fusion table so that they could have expressed their coordiantes in DwC, as,
e.g.:
DwC:decimalLatitude=41.5
DwC:decimalLongitude=-70.7
DwC:geodeticDatum=XYZ
(I would argue that it should be kosher DwC to express the above as simply
XYZ:lat and XYZ:long. DwC already incorporates terms from other namespaces,
such as Dublin Core, so there is precedent for this.
2. DwC:scientificName might be more user friendly than taxonomy:binomial and
the other taxonomy machine tags EOL uses for flickr images. If DwC:scientificName
isn't self-explanatory enough, a user can look it up, and see that any
scientific name is acceptable, at any taxonomic rank, or not having any rank.
And once we have a scientific name, higher ranks can be inferred.
3. Catalogue of Life was an important part of the workflow, but we had some
problems with it. Future bioblitzes might consider using something like a CoL
fork, as recently described by Rod Page [4].
4. We didn't include "basisOfRecord" in the original data profile,
and so it wasn't a column in the Fusion Table [5]. But when a transcriber felt
it was necessary to include in order to capture data in a particular field
sheet, she just added the column to the table. This flexibility of schema is
important, and is in harmony with the semantic web.
5. There seemed to be enthusiasm for another field event at next year's TDWG.
This could be an opportunity to gather other types of data (eg.
character data) and thereby
i) expose meeting particpants to another set of everyday problems from the
world of biodiversity workflows, and ii) try other TDWG technology on for size,
e.g. the observation exchange format, annotation framework, etc.
Happy Thanksgiving to all in Canada -
Joel.
----
1. http://groups.google.com/group/tdwg-bioblitz/web/tdwg-bioblitz-profile-v1-1
2. Slightly bastardizing our old observation ontology - http://spire.umbc.edu/ontologies/Observation.owl
3. http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
4. http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/10/replicating-and-forking-data-in-2010.html
5. http://tables.googlelabs.com/DataSource?dsrcid=248798
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