[Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

Tue May 15 18:59:23 CDT 2012

I have been following this thread with some interest and increasing frustration.

We ask for $$millions of public funding to acquire specimens.
We ask for $$millions of public funding to house and curate such specimens.
We ask for $$millions of public funding to staff these collections with highly trained taxonomists.

Yet we want to block access to the specimen data because it is so poor (labels or identifications).
We complain about the data transcription problems caused by volunteers and "minimally trained" people, yet few "highly trained" individuals wish to devote their careers to data enter and validation.

> If you want to know the geographical distribution of a taxon, you gotta go out and measure it ... carefully!

And, if you want to know the geographical distribution of a taxon, you have to start at "Ground Zero" because nothing from the past is worth using.  Why then do we keep it?

Suck it up!  Nothing is perfect. Put it out there "warts and all" and begin the cleanup using community support. Don't build ivory towers to poor data sets.

We have all been frustrated at the problems data aggregators display but aggregators do not create data just display it - the data source is where the cleanup must begin.

There - I feel better now.

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Stephen Thorpe
Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2012 8:24 AM
To: David Campbell; TAXACOM at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

label data is a huge can of worms for all sorts of reasons! After having thought the issue through at some length, I have come to the probably rather unpopular conclusion that it is a bad idea to think that the totality of label data for any given taxon is a useful thing to have! It is somewhat analogous to the example of using WoRMS as a source for that squat lobster article on WP ... given the way the WoRMS page was at the time, it was best to just not mention it at all! There is a certain irony that it is common nowadays for scientists to spend money going on collecting tours to get fresh material of taxa for use in DNA analysis. Actually, it would be better to go on a collecting tour to gather reliable distributional information for the taxon! Any distribution map based on the uncritical acceptance of label data is likely to be problematic, unles the map is so coarse that points cover a significant proportion of the planet! Even worse is displaying a  distribution map of a tiny subsample of available label data! If you want to know the geographical distribution of a taxon, you gotta go out and measure it ... carefully!

Stephen

________________________________
From: David Campbell <pleuronaia at gmail.com>
To: TAXACOM at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2012 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

> Unfortunately, original data labels are often extremely misleading,
> especially regarding distributional information. After georeferencing
> over 200,000 insect specimens from multiple institutions, the figures
> work out to over 20% of all original labels have significant omissions
> or ambiguities (the latter category being primarily things like
> abbreviations, uncertain reference points, uncertain date formats, or
> handwriting problems), and some 5% of all original labels have genuine
> errors of one sort or another (mostly typographical errors). I doubt
> such problems are unique to insect labels.

I can confirm that mollusk labels have similar issues with similarly high frequency, though I have not tallied percentages. In fact, insects may have better than average quality of average data because fewer specimens survive from the "I picked these up somewhere when my ship sailed around the world" era.  Having a misidentified specimen with good locality data is far more useful than a correctly identified specimen with bad locality data, as the identification can be fixed from the specimen.  Someone knowledgeable about the taxon or locality may be able to recognize that a record is supect, even without examining the specimen.  But all data in a database needs competent checking to be reliable.  And many larger collections will include items from various sources, of varying reliability for their localities and identifications.

The problem is compounded when online databases grab information from varied sources without careful verification or good harmonization protocols.  In particular, homonyms can lead to perfectly good information from one database being presented wrongly in another one, which claims that corrections should be referred back to the first database.

--
Dr. David Campbell
Collections Assistant
The Paleontological Research Institution
1259 Trumansburg Road
Ithaca NY 14850

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