Discover Life in America

Daniel Janzen - 29 July, 1999

using institution labels

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:28:00 -0600
To: sackley@compuserve.com, bill.armstrong@intermec.com, brianb@mizar.usc.edu,
        colwell@uconnvm.uconn.edu, christine.deal@intermec.com,
        whallwac@sas.upenn.edu, djanzen@sas.upenn.edu, mkaspari@ou.edu,
        becky_nichols@nps.gov, Chuck_Parker@nps.gov, KPerry@intermec.com,
        cthompso@sel.barc.usda.gov, windsord@tivoli.si.edu, dl@pick.uga.edu,
        longinoj@elwha.evergreen.edu, jugalde@inbio.ac.cr,
        longinoj@evergreen.edu, pick@pick.uga.edu, jbeach@eagle.cc.ukans.edu
From: Daniel Janzen <djanzen@sas.upenn.edu>
Subject: using institution labels

29 Jul 1999
Philadelphia

Jack said:
>
>Second, regarding Dan's comment about projects: I would suggest
>special project prefixes only when the project is REALLY BIG.
>Otherwise I recommend a project thinking about relationships with
>institutions where the material will eventually be deposited, and
>getting assigned a block of their numbers. That is how ALAS operates,
>using blocks of INBio numbers.


I agree with Jack's observation (though sometimes it will be
human/institutional domains rather than size of the project per se that
will determine whether to lock into dependency on an institution's labeling
system or go it alone) .

However, when as ecology and other mass-collection-projects become
administratively more integegrated with systematics-based projects (e.g.,
ALAS as an example), it is more than I could ever dream that generic
coordination/centralization of this nature could be/would be achievable in
the near future throughout many countries or within many single countries.
That is to say, INBio is happy to commit to ALAS for many obvious reasons,
but getting the Smithsonian, for example, to agree to assign a large block
of numbers to each of the major insect collecting efforts in the US would
be intellectually possible but politically not practical, me thinks/opines.

Just as it requires a committment on the part of the field project to stay
with the accord, as Jack and Rob are doing in ALAS, it also requires a
committment on the part of the institution to "be" the prefix for the
project's barcodes, a committment that has a cash as well as a
politico/sociologico/tecnico element.

In the meantime, if there is no mechanism for a free-standing project to
voluntarily and easily (straightforwardly) central register a prefix for a
"its" bar codes, at the least, there are going to be great flocks of bar
codes with raw numbers or unconsciously duplicated prefixes on them
cascading into (and through) museums and other sorts of cyberspace/physical
repositories.

P.S.  There is another function of the prefix besides lending uniquess to
the numeric following.  The alpha prefix INBIO, ALAS, GSMNP, etc.  tells
the viewer (or the search engine) that there is a large cluster of fields
and metadata at that "point".  The search engine may extract only from, for
example, 12 of those fields (the same 12 it is extracting from other DBs to
create the content for the form you have submitted).  However, there will
be a metadata registry somewhere in the system that will tell you or anyone
else what is the total set of fields associated with a specimen with the
prefix INBio, ALAS, whatever, many of which are largely unique to that DB
(e.g., my event-based records have date of prepupa, date of pupation, and
date of eclosion fields).  So, you can then search the entire system for
records (wherever the specimen or a record of a specimen happens to be
housed) that you know will have that largely unique data behind them by
searching for that prefix rather than for that numeric.    Once you have
your list of records, you can then query that particular DB for the content
of that largely unique set of fields, with a form that would be largely
frustrating to the search engine if applied generally across all museums,
for example.

Dan and Winnie and Espinita (who especially likes bar codes)





Discover Life in America | Science | Unique Identifiers & Barcodes | Correspondence | Daniel Janzen - 29 July, 1999