data sharing

[Stuart G. Poss]

Hugh Wilson wrote:

> looking forward to being impressed, although it seems to me that the
> process whereby various 'experts' establish standards and protocols
> for adoption of the systematics community has been going on forever.
>

And will necessarily continue to go on for as long as
collections-oriented researchers are at it, since standards and
protocols are only conventions, measures of the consensus reached among
members of the community to use them.  These will necessarily evolve as
our needs to communicate information evolve and the underlying models of
the information conveyed no longer meet our needs.  It is a collective
agreement of the community at large to consistently use standards and
protocols that determines their stability and usefulness, not the fact
that the experts haven't proposed the right standards or protocols.

Although expertise per se does not determine if a set of
standards/protocols will be widely or universally accepted by the
community, it does help to have sufficient background in the nature of
the data to be communicated to be in a position to suggest persuasively
the approaches and information models that will most likely be useful.


--
_____________________________________________________________________
Stuart G. Poss                       E-mail: sgposs at seahorse.ims.usm.edu
Senior Research Scientist & Curator  Tel: (228)872-4238
Gulf Coast Research Laboratory       FAX: (228)872-4204
P.O. Box 7000
Ocean Springs, MS  39566-7000