data sharing (was Re: Nat Hist Museum Web Page design...)

[Doug Yanega]

Ken Walker wrote:

>The internet has changed the way many of us conduct our daily work
>and it would seem that Museum collection management / development
>must take advantage of this new means of communication. The failure of
>collections to present an online vision will continue to hide the value
>of these collections and to keep the development of collections
>in the increasingly precarious circumstances they now face.
>
>Museum specimen databases store our Biological Legacy and as such are equally
>important for scientific and public access. An effective web interface into
>these collections should take into account their educational as well as
>scientific value and provide a port for both types of query access.

I think most people (myself certainly included) would agree with all this
(but see below).

>- Time and Space Queries.  This is an extremely useful query mode and only
>data collected from large collections can provide useful answers. Unlike the
>above monthly activity searches, here the user can choose to examine
>the presence of a taxon in particular months of the year in particular
>locations.

Actually, the technology is *already* available which makes this comment -
that only large collections are useful - outdated. It is possible to link
multiple independent databases (even when they use different software) and
run queries on all of them simultaneously, as if they were part of one
large database. Jim is one of the people at the forefront of this, in fact,
and he can tell you better than I.

>ECOLOGICAL SEARCHES
>- Host associations combined with the ability to map the resultant
>  answers.
>- Symbiotic relationships combined with the ability to map the resultant
>  answers.
>- Pollination indices for say either: What bees visit this plant? or What
>  plants do we know this bee visits? again combined with the ability to
>  map the resultant answers.

Now THIS area is the one I wanted to respond to, as it was just recently
suggested to me that placing this information online might effectively be
suicidal, in that this is information of potentially great *economic* value
to people outside of academia. I can see the point: some agricultural or
biocontrol company might be able to make millions off of something they
were only able to discover from such online data, while the people who
worked to *put* that data online would get zero. We've had dialogues here
in the past suggesting that it's bad enough that we have a long tradition
of passing out IDs for free, and that taxonomy has been taken for granted
as a result - WOULD we really just be asking for even worse exploitation if
we made all of our most valuable information available for free to everyone
in the world? Bear in mind, please, that I personally find the idea of
having to hoard data objectionable, but I'm not so sure that the point is
one we can simply wave off for philosophical reasons, given the economic
reality of things - as Ken says, we are faced with "increasingly precarious
circumstances", and we might need to consider, as a community, whether we
may have to start acting a bit more selfish, out of self-preservation
(there are already many institutions charging for IDs, for example). Not a
comfortable thought, but it seems it might be worth trying to provoke a
little discussion about it - most of all, to see if people have good ideas
how we can turn this to a "win-win" scenario where we can all share our
data AND share in any profit it may generate. Not a simple thing.
        I might also note that given the very real forces already at work
to make databases proprietary information, the future of data-sharing in
general is pretty uncertain, and we may well find ourselves in a situation
where putting our collections online is a one-way street. It also occurs to
me that people are already aware of potential problems arising from making
distribution information about rare and endangered organisms publicly
available, and that certainly does tie in to this general question.

So, what do people think?

Peace,

Doug Yanega    Depto. de Biologia Geral, Instituto de Ciencias Biologicas,
Univ. Fed. de Minas Gerais, Cx.P. 486, 30.161-970 Belo Horizonte, MG   BRAZIL
phone: 31-499-2579, fax: 31-499-2567  (from U.S., prefix 011-55)
                  http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~dyanega/
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82