Katydid CD ROM issues

[Doug Yanega]

Jim Beach wrote:

>The potential payoffs
>for systematics research and for society are orders of magnitude greater
>for distributed database systems which interoperate (even through
>relatively simple, standard query interfaces) than they are for stand-alone
>information resources.  That is very clear if one looks at what is
>happening with database systems in the molecular and structural biology
>communities and also with what the secondary publishing industry (BIOSIS,
>ISI, High Wire, Elsevier, and other science publishers, abstracters and
>indexers) is doing to integrate different *kinds* of publication data from
>different sources into a common product.  The unstoppable trend is data
>integration across levels of biological organization, publication, and
>human activity (research and environmental management, teaching, etc.).

I hesitate to glumly point out that this trend is entirely stoppable, and
in fact seems likely to be stopped, and probably all too soon. One look at
the ongoing legislative tussles over "intellectual property rights",
especially regarding databases, makes it clear that we might have most free
public access to such on-line resources closed for legal reasons, if things
continue along their present course. We in the systematic community are at
the periphery, and no one formulating these laws gives us any thought, but
the laws will affect us all the same. It would not be the first time the
taxonomic community was caught in the backwash of laws written to deal with
other matters, but defined broadly enough to include us.

>It's going to be a very exciting future for systematics and for collections
>based research if we can build the standards infrastructure and devote more
>of our precious technologists to the task of bringing species and specimen
>data, information and knowledge in interoperating systems on the Internet.

If other museums follow the trend of the NHM and declares every specimen's
data and image proprietary, it is going to quash such hopes rather
effectively, don't you think? If the world's major museums refuse to share
their data freely, this technology will have little to work with. I share
your vision - you *know* that I do - but I also see bad, bad things on the
horizon that could derail everything.

Rather than writing and posting a separate reply, I'll tack on Hugh
Wilson's comment here:

>  If professional
>societies or working scientific groups can provide useful information
>on the web for open public access, it will be *used*, and home sites
>providing access to the data will be visited by many.  Given the
>nature of web economics right now, this usage could (should) be used
>by professional societies as leverage to harvest community returns
>for community investment.  If professional societies were active in
>this area, the potential for returns to those providing the
>information, or at least the discipline, are high.  This is not the
>case for web info nodes controlled by institutions, agencies, or
>individuals that do not have direct contact with data contributors.
>
>So, I agree with Mary that "there is a potential here" that
>professional societies should *make* time to explore.

Web economics is such that most websites generate income by selling
advertising space. Who exactly will pay to sponsor a web page on, say, a
checklist and key for the water striders of the world? How much will they
pay? Will they pay in *advance*, to get the research done? How does one
deal with conflicts of interest? If there's exploration to be done,
questions like that are the first ones to ask. Traditionally, taxonomists
are terrible salesmen, as we've bemoaned here before, and the lack of
ad-funded taxonomic websites is yet another reflection of this (though,
admittedly, a lot can be attributed to that "conflict of interest" category
above).

Peace,


Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
                http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82