data sharing

[Hugh Wilson]

I don't "reject the utility" of 'audit trails' but only suggest that
- to me - it seems strange to worry about this when, at this point
in time, there is little to audit.  What sort of networked info is
being used - at this point in time - for biodiversity policy
decisions?  ITIS?  TNC? maybe CNN?

I am not aware of *any* specimen-based (vouchered, documented)
distribution map on the network (open, public access) for *any*
North American plant or animal species that is not endemic to a
given state.  Anybody have a pointer to such a map?  Given this lack
of very simple information and the mass of data vouchered to the
county level that is sitting dormant in national/regional/state
collections, its not difficult to understand why collections at many
U.S. schools are heading to the warehouse.

So, in terms of relative *priorities* for both those that might use
the information and those responsible for its maintenance and
creation, its important - in my view - to move information from
collections to the public along the quickest, most direct path. This,
again from my personal perspective, will not be accomplished by
continued investment of research funding in complex data
acquisition/expression systems that are designed for use by academic
specialists.  This has been going on for *years*.  Progress can be
made if the most complex problem - data sharing and merger - is
approached within a simple development/expression system, such as
checklists of taxa with state-level distributions.  Once functional
'beta' systems are developed and the primary problems resolved,
refinements - such as data change tracking or additional label data -
could be built into subsequent 'versions' of the system.

Given the nature of problems associated with sharing and merger of
collections data, both technical and 'social', I think that
professional societies could play a significant role for both
development and stewardship and network-based systems.  A proposal to
test this notion, recently submitted to NSF, is at:

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/aspt/pro98bbase.htm

On  3 Dec 98 at 16:44, Peter Rauch <anamaria at GRINNELL.BERKELEY.EDU>
wrote:


> I suppose I'd like to ask you why you believe that creating audit trails
> is a priori unnecessary in information systems to be accessed by "public
> users" of (electronically-accessible) collections data? I reject the
> arguments that phone companies don't do it (seems irrelevant), and that
> the traditional systematic uses didn't need audit trails (traditional
> taxonomists were and probably still are almost anal about their data
> handling, and they were generally accessing the primary, not just
> secondary, data), and besides, it's the new uses about which we might
> want to understand the impacts of data errors before rejecting the
> utility of audit trails.

>

Hugh D. Wilson
Texas A&M University - Biology
h-wilson at tamu.edu (409-845-3354)
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/Wilson/homepage.html