Darwin Core (DwC) Hour #14 is almost here: An Attribution Darwin Core Extension - What Would That Look Like?

WHEN: Monday, October 29 at 11:00am EDT / 15:00 UTC

WHERE: https://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/room

PRESENTERS: Anne Thessen (Oregon State University, ORCID) & David Shorthouse (CMN, ORCID).

ABSTRACT: Research collections are an important tool for understanding the Earth, its systems, and human interaction. Despite the importance of collections, many are not maintained or curated as thoroughly as we desire. Part of the reason for this is the lack of professional reward for collection, curation, or maintenance. To address this gap in attribution metadata, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization co-endorsed a Working Group to create recommendations for the representation of attribution metadata. After 18 months, this Working Group recommended the use of PROV entities and properties to link people (Agent), the curatorial actions they perform (Activity), and the digital or physical objects they are curating (Entity). Assigning a Role to an Agent is optional. These recommendations are discussed in the context of the RDA, TDWG, and existing standards.

Future work includes (1) adapting these recommendations to the specific needs of TDWG and the natural history collections community, which could include development of a Darwin Core extension, (2) recommendations on how to best record agents, activities, and entities in collections management platforms such that these data can be shared, and (3) recommendations and possible solutions to help accelerate the process of reconciling agents and their activities in legacy data.

EXTRAS:

• Explore the Darwin Core Questions & Answers wiki: https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/wiki
• See which of your questions have been asked and answered so far: https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/issues
• Submit your question / volunteer (yourself or someone) to do a webinar on a DwC topic: https://tinyurl.com/zja2muz
• See what terms DwC recommends using a controlled vocabulary for: https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/wiki/Controlled-Vocabularies
• Compare the above to what's actually inside some of the DwC fields that suggest using a controlled vocabulary (data from GBIF, iDigBio, VertNet, and soon ALA): https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/tree/master/data

Happy Darwin Core and Data Quality, and hope to see you soon!

Erica Krimmel, et al. from the iDigBio Data Mgmt Interest Group and the Darwin Core Hour Team

Please kindly excuse cross-postings! Webinar series brought to you by the iDigBio Data Management Interest Group (DMI). We use Adobe Connect for our webinars; see https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Web_Conferencing for hints on best experience.