 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 Dublin Core properties may be supplied on a record-by-record basis or as a set of default values within the metadata for the entire data set.
The ALA will be able to use OAI-PMH or the tab-delimited/comma-separated data set to harvest basic metadata about the multimedia objects in a collection.
This same set of Dublin Core properties can also be used for registering a single multimedia object as an online resource.
The ALA will use a range of standard approaches to link to data resources. Each has particular benefits.
In addition to those protocols addressed in the following subsections, the ALA expects to support the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) for exchange of species occurrence data (using properties from the Darwin Core or the TaxonOccurrence vocabulary). Specific recommendations will be added at a later date on the use of WFS and other OGC standards.
TAPIR is the current version of the remote query protocol developed and promoted by TDWG. It is effectively an enhanced replacement for the two earlier TDWG data access protocols, DiGIR and BioCASe. The ALA will interface with existing DiGIR or BioCASe resources but recommends the use of TAPIR for future implementations.
TAPIR is a general-purpose language for querying remote databases and for retrieving data in formats suited to the needs of the requestor. It relies on the existence of agreed community data models. Each such model provides a set of agreed properties which can be mapped against a range of distributed databases, even though their underlying data structures may be very different.
For example, a collection database, an ecological data set and a repository of biodiversity image metadata may all contain fields which represent the scientific name of an organism and the spatial coordinates and date associated with a particular occurrence of that organism. TAPIR allows all of these databases to advertise the fact that they have records containing fields which correspond to the ScientificName, EarliestDateCollected, Latitude and