Please
note, the most current draft of the DarwinCore is:
My primary concern with the latest draft is the
absence of an explicit class identifier (and an implicit class
definition) that indicates what kind of data object the sender is
transmitting. If an indexer/aggregator is indexing multiple kinds of
resources, as GBIF is, and a publisher provides a record with these elements
[ScientificName, ScientificNameAuthorship, NamePublishedIn, and Country],
how should the indexer interepret this record? Is it an organism
occurrence record, an authoritative taxonomic record (the country name
indicating the entire known range of the taxon), or part of a taxonomic
checklist for that country? The term/element [BasisOfRecord] is the first
step in narrowing the possible meanings, but it's the only step and it appears
not to be a required step. (I interpret the "Status: recommended" to mean
that it's optional.) At a minimum, BasisOfRecord should be
required. It would still be possible to publish garbage (at least hard to
interpret records) because our tools don't constrain structure, and there
isn't (yet) any guidance controlling the structures for different classes of
objects.
The
new GBIF Internet Publishing Toolkit (IPT) supports one-to-many relationships
among a series of flat tables and looks like it's going to make it easier to
transmit more complicated data than we were doing with DiGIR and TAPIR. In
conjunction with this new expanded bag of elements we could see a lot more
complex data get published. If I may use a skiing metaphor, we've
been on the bunny slopes (for beginners) up until now. The new DarwinCore
looks like a nicely groomed black diamond slope, but we haven't had any lessons
or even watched anyone else do what we're going to attempt. I think we're
going to end up in a heap at the bottom of the hill, and the aggregators are
going to have to sort it out. ( Woohoo! Extreme biodiversity informatics!
)
Finally, I did not mean to say that the Ontology should
not be ratified, as in not supported; what I meant was that it should not be a
standard because we will want to change its contents without versioning the
ontology as a whole. (Also, its not an application schema, so it can't be
used directly unless we venture into somewhat uncharted territory.) Its
role is to help us keep our application schemas coordinated.
The
earlier versions of the DarwinCore (or our protocols, or the way we used them
together) were too limiting (see Greg's comments); this version allows
terms to be combined in nonsensical ways.
It could make life very difficult for data integrators.
I
think the bottom line is that we URGENTLY need a similar concerted effort to
advance the TDWG (biodiversity informatics) ontology, and a companion set of
application schemas coming forward from the collections, marine biology, paleo,
observation, taxon-name-concept groups as soon as possible.
-Stan
Kevin,
I agree with you and
Stan that the ontology is useful to all schemas. It seems to me that a
“TDWG Ontology” is a totally new and different kind of thing than all the data
exchange standards of the prior 10 years – DwC, SDD, TCS, etc. But, it
is a very useful and important new kind of thing that should be part of the
TDWG standards architecture. It challenges prior thinking about the nature of
TDWG standards to grasp what standardizing on an ontology means. But, I
think it’s what is needed.
If TDWG standardized
on one Ontology, then the vocabulary of all data exchange could be
standardized on it. Then all TDWG standards could be revised over time
to comply to that vocabulary standard, including DwC.
Stan said: “ I'd like to hear
the rationale for combining taxonomic name/concept with organism occurrence.”
An occurrence record generally has
an organism’s name associated with it in the real
world. It is
necessary and inevitable that vocabulary about organism names will be used in
an occurrence data exchange schema like DwC. We have been stymied with this
idea for years. A standard Ontology/vocabulary for the elements of name
information needed to be associated with an occurrence, or a description, or a
taxon concept would go a long way toward solving this duality. The
“standard vocabulary” would not be standardized within DwC but it would be
used in DwC.
Of course there is
the problem of the hundreds of installations of DiGIR that use DwC “classic”
and are no doubt not going to change for a long time. I think they just
have to be accepted and worked around going forward. It’s impractical to
think of anything else. But, the past should not roadblock the future
and we need to get moving toward that future.
Stan thinks that the
Ontology is not appropriate for TDWG ratification. Why not? Change
has to start somewhere. Yes, other standards would probably be in conflict if
the Ontology were ratified, but I think we want to ultimately have consistency
across all the standards and that means there has to be change going
forward. I think a ratified TDWG Ontology would provide the foundation
upon which to start building those changes.
Chuck