[tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz

Tue Oct 12 04:24:26 CEST 2010

I agree fully that recommended vocabularies would help immensely. As with
many Darwin Core terms, the recommended vocabulary for establishmentMeans
doesn't actually exist yet. The examples are there in the Darwin Core term
commentary to set the stage and give people an idea of the intent.
Controlled vocabulary is an area ripe for development for whoever is ready
to actually use the controlled terms meaningfully. One way to begin
vocabulary development is discuss options here on tdwg-content. Conclusions
can be taken forward first as recommendations on the associated Darwin Core
secondary (non-normative) documentation pages, such as
http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Occurrence, then more formally in a
shared community vocabulary management system, which is another currently
active thread on this discussion forum.

Cheers,

John

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 7:11 PM, <Donald.Hobern at csiro.au> wrote:

>  If a recommended controlled vocabulary was provided, rather than
> examples, that would help.
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> Donald
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> Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia
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> CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601
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> Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
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> Email: Donald.Hobern at csiro.au
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> Web: http://www.ala.org.au/
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> *From:* gtuco.btuco at gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco at gmail.com] *On Behalf Of
> *John Wieczorek
> *Sent:* Tuesday, 12 October 2010 12:47 PM
>
> *To:* Hobern, Donald (CES, Black Mountain)
> *Cc:* deepreef at bishopmuseum.org; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org;
> tdwg-bioblitz at googlegroups.com
>
> *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz
>
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> Is this hypothetical "weeding out" something that couldn't be done with
> controlled vocabularies? The recommended best practice is to use one, and
> that's as controlled as we ever get with Darwin Core terms outside of
> implementations.
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> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 6:43 PM, <Donald.Hobern at csiro.au> wrote:
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> Hi Rich.
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> I recognise this (and could probably define many different useful flags).
> The bottom line is really whether or not the location is one which should be
> used for distribution analysis, niche modelling and similar activities.
> There will certainly be many grey areas, but it would be good if software
> could weed out captive occurrences.
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> Donald
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> [image: untitled]
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> Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia
>
> CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601
>
> Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
>
> Email: Donald.Hobern at csiro.au
>
> Web: http://www.ala.org.au/
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> *From:* Richard Pyle [mailto:deepreef at bishopmuseum.org]
> *Sent:* Tuesday, 12 October 2010 12:33 PM
> *To:* Hobern, Donald (CES, Black Mountain); tuco at berkeley.edu
>
>
> *Cc:* tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; tdwg-bioblitz at googlegroups.com
>
> *Subject:* RE: [tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz
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> I'm not so sure a simple flag will do it.  We have examples ranging from
> animals in zoos, to escaped animals, to intentionally and unintentionally
> introduced populations, to naturalized populations -- and just about
> everything in-between.  Where on this spectrum would you draw the line for
> flagging something as "naturally occurring"?
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>
> Rich
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>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:
> tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] *On Behalf Of *Donald.Hobern at csiro.au
> *Sent:* Monday, October 11, 2010 2:59 PM
> *To:* tuco at berkeley.edu
> *Cc:* tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; tdwg-bioblitz at googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz
>
> Thanks, John.
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> 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.
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> Donald
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> [image: untitled]
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> Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia
>
> CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601
>
> Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
>
> Email: Donald.Hobern at csiro.au
>
> Web: http://www.ala.org.au/
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> *From:* gtuco.btuco at gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco at gmail.com] *On Behalf Of
> *John Wieczorek
> *Sent:* Tuesday, 12 October 2010 11:34 AM
> *To:* Hobern, Donald (CES, Black Mountain)
> *Cc:* jsachs at csee.umbc.edu; tdwg-bioblitz at googlegroups.com;
> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] What I learned at the TechnoBioBlitz
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> 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 at 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
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>
>
>
> Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia
> CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601
> Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
> Email: Donald.Hobern at csiro.au
> Web: http://www.ala.org.au/
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:
> tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of joel sachs
> Sent: Monday, 11 October 2010 10:47 PM
> To: tdwg-bioblitz at googlegroups.com; tdwg-content at 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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