ils of nomenclatural and taxonomic literature) and often a range of legislative, distributional and other information.
In addition, the hierarchical nature of classifications and checklists is handled in different ways in different databases. Some databases have a single table to accommodate taxa of all ranks, and rely on parent-child relationships and explicit taxon rank elements. Others flatten the hierarchy and assign different ranks to different database columns. There is similar variation in the way that different databases model the relationships between the names each database accepts for a species and the various synonyms identified in the database for the same species.
All of this makes it hard to provide generic recommendations for sharing data of this kind. To simplify the problem slightly, we can distinguish data sets according to their primary purpose:
There are several relevant data standards which have been used to share such data. The ALA will seek to support data shared using any of the following models:
Nomenclatural and taxonomic databases can be exposed as a TCS document (accessed via a Plain URL) or as a set of smaller TCS documents each representing a single taxon name or taxon concept (and accessed via a TAPIR search interface). It is however preferable in such cases to use the TaxonName and TaxonConcept vocabularies and to use LSIDs (and perhaps also OAI-PMH) in addition to, or instead of TAPIR.
For other data sets, it will often be more appropriate simply to share the entire data set as a single document in a tab-delimited or comma-separated format, with terms from the TaxonName and/or TaxonConcept vocabularies or the SPICE Common Data Model as column headings and explanation of the purpose of the list included as part of the metadata for the data set. This approach may be applicable for listing protected species (red lists, CITES, etc.), species exhibiting some characteristic (e.g. endemic, invasive, venomous or leaf-mining taxa) or checklists for protected areas or localities.
Resources intended to assist users with identifying a set of organisms can be divided into two main categories:
The ALA is working with the Taxonomic Resource Information Network (TRIN), IdentifyLife, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Key To Nature and others to explore ways to manage access to descriptive data and identification tools. For the present, the recommendation is to share data using Delta or SDD wherever possible, and to register other resources as URLs with associated metadata.
TDWG (in conjunction with GBIF, EOL and a range of other projects) has been developing the Species Profile Model as a vocabulary for use in advertising and exchanging blocks of information about different species.
This vocabulary is still under development but is intended to address a number of needs. For the ALA, particular benefits of SPM are likely to include:
At present all of these uses are still being explored. The ALA would be interested to hear from any projects or researchers interested in trial use of SPM.
Images and other multimedia resources are typically shared across the Internet in three different ways:
This variation is a complication in the task of managing access to image resources. Any of these three approaches may meet a user’s needs to view images and other multimedia objects for a particular organism, but only the first approach easily supports display of alternate views (e.g. thumbnails). The ALA will allow data providers to specify in their metadata which of these three approaches relates to each data resource, either on a record-by-record basis or for an entire data set (see below).
The preferred approach to sharing metadata about images (including the actual links to the images) will be OAI-PMH using properties from the standard OAI Dublin Core mapping (oai_dc). Where this is not feasible, a set of metadata fields for every image in a collection can be shared as a tab-delimited or comma-separated file. These metadata fields may include:
Subject and Identifier must be supplied for every record, but the other Dubl