RE: [Digir-dev] Question on DiGIR Darwin Core and uniqueness of Catalog Numbers

[Jim C. <jr...@an...>]

>We spent a fair bit of time in Oaxaca talking about the many cases in which a
>single resource is served by more than one provider.  Actually, these are
>cases where several *copies* (not necessarily identical) of a resource are
>being served by more than one provider.  We don't have a solution to this,
>yet, as it seems to be a problem primarily for people who are interested to
>know how many records we have on line.

and for people wanting to know that they are receiving the original, 
supposedly authoritative version and not a possibly 'value-added' version 
from a secondary source.

>Even more to the point, there is nothing that prevents a single record from
>being exposed/served through two or more resources (imagine a taxonomically
>defined resource and a geographically defined resources from a single
>provider).

Another real example of this is likely to be a collection, such as ours, 
providing records through DIGIR, also providing them to Australia's Virtual 
Herbarium through a DIGIR portal, and a national GBIF portal which can 
harvest and provide the same record from several sources.

I do not see this redundancy as a bad thing as it might help ensure that 
the info is always available [ not unlike Kaazaa, etc. :) ] - it is just 
something that will need to to be managed sos that people are not buried in 
collateral duplication.

>I don't know.  Does the simple web services approach say that a separate 
>URx should be available for every resource?  I think this is an important
>question.

I guess the question where I am coming from is should every resource have 
only one URx?

In botany this is probably a meaningless or irrelevant question since 
duplicate specimens mean that the same (in an informational sense) records 
will be served from multiple institutions.  This already happens with the 
AVH and are not dealing with this yet...

>I don't agree that it's a problem with DiGIR, but with the people who are
>configuring DiGIR providers/resources.

I agree with this, at least in part...  our first brief sortie into DIGIR 
provision just prior to the GBIF meetings left me a little less than 
satisfied with the restrictions we seem to have to work with in getting our 
into the system with what we regarded as suitable and appropriate 
attribution.   It was a bit of a rush and we may be able to do better with 
a bit more perserverance

>Our view is that the technology should be made as transparent as possible.

Yeah, yeah...  unfortunately my experience with technology is that it does 
not always clarify...

>An end user should see a list of
>resources in a DiGIR portal almost the same way they would keep a list of
>addresses for written requests.  Resources should be identified primarily by
>the custodians or owners of those resources.  The technical provider has done
>something they shouldn't, the original resource manager needs to take that up
>with the provider.

Actually I think most end users just want to see an answer and have a 
little faith that it is sort of a right answer and I think that most would 
be quite happy if opaque technology were to have a stab at coalescing that 
it thought to be the same records...

>The more difficult problem is going to come with the Russian Doll model for
>data, where a provider doesn't just make other peoples' resources available,
>but "adds value" to them by doing things like "correcting" taxonomic names,
>adding latitude-longitude, or converting lat-lon to a consistent map
>projection.  This will come.  What problems will it create?

I had never actually thought of it as a Russian doll before...  the 
situation you describe is real and actually happening - in our own 
government department and even in our own institution.  When you give 
someone some data they can not resist enhancing it at destination rather 
than at source.  Getting people to tidy up the data before they take it, or 
even to provide constructive feedback, is next to impossible...

jim


~ Jim Croft ~ jr...@an... ~ 02-62465500 ~ www.anbg.gov.au/jrc/ ~