IPT Demonstration Extension

This is a demonstration extension to illustrate an efficient and structured approach for providing Local Contexts information associated with the records in a resource.

As custodians of biological collections we are naturally concerned with the provenance and long-term integrity of data. We feel it is appropriate to include more than just the Local Context Project ID in resources that are based on these collections.

In particular we feel including a richer set of data (not just the Project ID) is critical to address situations where a user may not be working online or may chose not to refer to online resources, it is important to capture the state when the data was downloaded/provided or after a significant length of time. In some circumstances this may also be necessary for legislative compliance.

We also believe that having a richer and structured data set will assist tools/systems drawing on the resources, for example, they will not need to make repeated calls to an API to obtain the necessary data; and the structured data makes it more amenable to uses such as searching and filtering.

Our hope is that a specific Local Contexts extension is embraced by the community, even if only as a short term solution while more complete “data rights” extensions are developed and agreed. We feel a strong responsibility and important obligation to communities with which we partner to include the Local Contexts information within the resources as soon as possible and without delay. Whilst this information is not included in resources we publish, we feel we are not meeting these responsibilities. We have therefore included this extension in our collection based resources published to the GBIF network.

Note - the development and testing of extensions such as this is quick and very simple - so it can easily be created to meet needs such as this (assuming a vocabulary of terms exists or can quickly be agreed). However, this is not the case for the injestion, integration and presentation of these data in down stream tools - whilst we would like to see Local Contexts Labels and Notices presented in these tools, we acknowledge that this takes time and resource.

Extension available for download here: LocalContextProject.xml

Note this version has the xml-style directive so currently does not display online. In the meantime, to view the extension online use the version below:

View online: LocalContextProject - view online