[tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz

Mon Oct 11 20:00:32 CEST 2010

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 6:38 AM, "Markus Döring (GBIF)"
<mdoering at gbif.org>wrote:

> I see. From what I understand (please correct me if Im wrong, John)
> dwc:recordedBy is rather the primary observer in the field than the person
> keying in the dwc metadata record about it.

Yes. DwC doesn't have a term for the person creating the record - recordedBy
is meant to be the collector(s) or observer(s) in the field who made the
determination that a species occurred there.

> If that's the missing bit I would use dcterm:creator instead:
> http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#elements-creator and we could
> think about including this into the official record level terms in darwin
> core.
>
> dc:source is another record level term I personally include very often
> although not explicitly listed in the dwc guide. For species checklists I
> often want to include a link back to the often richer source webpage.
>

dcterms:source seems like a reasonable addition to the record-level terms
borrowed from Dublin Core. There is no evidence that we ever attempted to
include it, which means at least that we didn't have a reason to reject it.

> Markus
>
>
>
> On Oct 11, 2010, at 14:53, joel sachs wrote:
>
> > Markus,
> >
> > The issue is that the observer and the the recorder are not always the
> same person. A student or a team member might report the observation to a
> teacher/team leader, who then creates the record. As you and Tim point out,
> the definition of recordedBy does allow us to use the term for both
> observers and record creators, but then we lose the distinction between the
> two.
> >
> > Joel.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, "Markus Döring (GBIF)" wrote:
> >
> >> Joel,
> >> thanks for this nice summary. Darwin Core definitely needs far more
> examples to illustrate its use. We should probably provide various examples
> for all the different use cases we already know dwc can be used for.
> >>
> >> Darwin Core has a recordedBy term. Did that not fit your obs:observedBy
> property and if not what exactly is the difference?
> >> See http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#recordedBy
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Markus
> >>
> >>
> >> On Oct 11, 2010, at 13:46, joel sachs wrote:
> >>
> >>> 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
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> tdwg-content mailing list
> >>> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> >>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
> > _______________________________________________
> > tdwg-content mailing list
> > tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> > http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20101011/425d3fa2/attachment.html 