[Nhcoll-l] Proposing a Preparation extension to Darwin Core - community feedback

[Bentley, Andrew Charles]

Hi all

During various conversations I have had over the past couple of months in my capacity as Specify usability consultant and ichthyology collection manager it has become clear to me that one of the major hurdles that is experienced with aggregators and sharing of data through Darwin Core is the preparation field.  Most of the other one-to-many relationships have been taken care of (identifications, measurements, collectors, sequences, media etc.) through similar extensions or other means leaving preparations as the only one left to tackle.  Due to the nature of fish collections and our propensity to utilize the one-to-many relationship between specimens and preparations for all the various preparations we house (ethanol, cleared and stained, skeletal, tissue), coupled with the fact that there is only a single field in Darwin Core for preparations, mandates that we need to concatenate our preparations into a string (or simply not map them) in order to be able to map them effectively.  As such these concatenations can and do include information about preparation type, counts and various other pieces of information thus littered the field with a huge amount of unique values (160,000 to be exact).  With the ever increasing proliferation of tissue collections in all disciplines this is becoming a more pressing issue for more than just fish collections and is now more widespread across all disciplines.

Given the above, I was thinking of proposing a preparation extension to Darwin Core to accommodate this but as a first step would like to get feedback from the community as to the perceived need and efficacy for such an extension.  The extension need not be very complex and would nominally include fields for preparation type (controlled vocabulary), count (number), prepared by (agent), prepared date and maybe a unique GUID.  However, the extension would only be useful if the aggregators (GBIF, iDigBio etc.) were able to display the data within this extension as part of their portal infrastructure thereby increasing the usefulness of the records for research purposes.  Do you think such an extension would be useful?  What fields would you like to see included?  Question for the aggregators - would this data be able to be displayed fore efficient use by the ever growing user community?

Any comments, suggestions, ideas for additional fields etc. are most welcome. Please forward to others who may not be on NHCOLL and who may be interested.

Thanks in advance

Andy

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Andy Bentley
Ichthyology Collection Manager
University of Kansas
Biodiversity Institute
Dyche Hall
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS, 66045-7561
USA

Tel: (785) 864-3863
Fax: (785) 864-5335
Email: abentley at ku.edu<mailto:abentley at ku.edu>
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