ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7618-5230
Current Organisation
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
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Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 2020
Abstract: People are one of the best known and most stable entities in the bio ersity knowledge graph. The wealth of public information associated with people and the ability to identify them uniquely open up the possibility to make more use of these data in bio ersity science. Person data are almost always associated with entities such as specimens, molecular sequences, taxonomic names, observations, images, traits and publications. For ex le, the digitization and the aggregation of specimen data from museums and herbaria allow us to view a scientist’s specimen collecting in conjunction with the whole corpus of their works. However, the metadata of these entities are also useful in validating data, integrating data across collections and institutional databases and can be the basis of future research into bio ersity and science. In addition, the ability to reliably credit collectors for their work has the potential to change the incentive structure to promote improved curation and maintenance of natural history collections.
Publisher: Pensoft Publishers
Date: 10-10-2022
Abstract: Scientific collections have been built by people. For hundreds of years, people have collected, studied, identified, preserved, documented and curated collection specimens. Understanding who those people are is of interest to historians, but much more can be made of these data by other stakeholders once they have been linked to the people’s identities and their biographies. Knowing who people are helps us attribute work correctly, validate data and understand the scientific contribution of people and institutions. We can evaluate the work they have done, the interests they have, the places they have worked and what they have created from the specimens they have collected. The problem is that all we know about most of the people associated with collections are their names written on specimens. Disambiguating these people is the challenge that this paper addresses. Disambiguation of people often proves difficult in isolation and can result in staff or researchers independently trying to determine the identity of specific in iduals over and over again. By sharing biographical data and building an open, collectively maintained dataset with shared knowledge, expertise and resources, it is possible to collectively deduce the identities of in iduals, aggregate biographical information for each person, reduce duplication of effort and share the information locally and globally. The authors of this paper aspire to disambiguate all person names efficiently and fully in all their variations across the entirety of the biological sciences, starting with collections. Towards that vision, this paper has three key aims: to improve the linking, validation, enhancement and valorisation of person-related information within and between collections, databases and publications to suggest good practice for identifying people involved in biological collections and to promote coordination amongst all stakeholders, including in iduals, natural history collections, institutions, learned societies, government agencies and data aggregators.
Publisher: Pensoft Publishers
Date: 03-08-2022
DOI: 10.3897/BISS.6.91194
Abstract: People are involved with the collection and curation of all bio ersity data, whether they are researchers, members of the public, taxonomists, conservationists, collection managers or wildlife managers. Knowing who those people are and connecting their biographical information to the bio ersity data they collect helps us contextualise their scientific work. We are particularly concerned with those people and communities involved in the collection and identification of biological specimens. People from herbaria and natural science museums have been collecting and preserving specimens from all over the world for more than 200 years. The problem is that many of these people are only known by unstandardized names written on specimen labels, often with only initials and without any biographical information. The process of identifying and linking in iduals to their biographies enables us to improve the quality of the data held by collections while also quantifying the contributions of the often underappreciated people who collected and identified these specimens. This process improves our understanding of the history of collecting, and addresses current and future needs for maintaining the provenance of specimens so as to comply with national and international practices and regulations. In this talk we will outline the steps that collection managers, data scientists, curators, software engineers, and collectors can take to work towards fully disambiguated collections. With ex les, we can show how they can use these data to help them in their work, in the evaluation of their collections, and in measuring the impact of in iduals and organisations, local to global.
Publisher: Pensoft Publishers
Date: 13-06-2019
DOI: 10.3897/BISS.3.35074
Abstract: The concept of building a network of relationships between entities, a knowledge graph, is one of the most effective methods to understand the relations between data. By organizing data, we facilitate the discovery of complex patterns not otherwise evident in the raw data. Each datum at the nodes of a knowledge graph needs a persistent identifier (PID) to reference it unambiguously. In the bio ersity knowledge graph, people are key elements (Page 2016). They collect and identify specimens, they publish, observe, work with each other and they name organisms. Yet bio ersity informatics has been slow to adopt PIDs for people and people are currently represented in collection management systems as text strings in various formats. These text strings often do not separate in iduals within a collecting team and little biographical information is collected to disambiguate collectors. In March 2019 we organised an international workshop to find solutions to the problem of PIDs for people in collections with the aim of identifying people unambiguously across the world's natural history collections in all of their various roles. Stakeholders were represented from 11 countries, representing libraries, collections, publishers, developers and name registers. We want to identify people for many reasons. Cross-validation of information about a specimen with biographical information on the specimen can be used to clean data. Mapping specimens from in idual collectors across multiple herbaria can geolocate specimens accurately. By linking literature to specimens through their authors and collectors we can create collaboration networks leading to a much better understanding of the scientific contribution of collectors and their institutions. For taxonomists, it will be easier to identify nomenclatural type and syntype material, essential for reliable typification. Overall, it will mean that geographically dispersed specimens can be treated much more like a single distributed infrastructure of specimens as is envisaged in the European Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections Infrastructure (DiSSCo). There are several person identifier systems in use. For ex le, the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is a widely used system for published authors. The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), has broader scope and incorporates VIAF. The ORCID identifier system provides self-registration of living researchers. Also, Wikidata has identifiers of people, which have the advantage of being easy to add to and correct. There are also national systems, such as the French and German authority files, and considerable sharing of identifiers, particularly on Wikidata. This creates an integrated network of identifiers that could act as a brokerage system. Attendees agreed that no one identifier system should be recommended, however, some are more appropriate for particular circumstances. Some difficulties have still to be resolved to use those identifier schemes for bio ersity : 1) duplicate entries in the same identifier system 2) handling collector teams and preserving the order of collectors 3) how we integrate identifiers with standards such as Darwin Core, ABCD and in the Global Bio ersity Information Facility and 4) many living and dead collectors are only known from their specimens and so they may not pass notability standards required by many authority systems. The participants of the workshop are now working on a number of fronts to make progress on the adoption of PIDs for people in collections. This includes extending pilots that have already been trialed, working with identifier systems to make them more suitable for specimen collectors and talking to service providers to encourage them to use ORCID iDs to identify their users. It was concluded that resolving the problem of person identifiers for collections is largely not a lack of a solution, but a need to implement solutions that already exist.
Publisher: Pensoft Publishers
Date: 31-08-2021
DOI: 10.3897/BISS.5.73702
Abstract: The natural history specimens of the world have been documented on paper labels, often physically attached to the specimen itself. As we transcribe these data to make them digital and more useful for analysis, we make interpretations. Sometimes these interpretations are trivial, because the label is unambiguous, but often the meaning is not so clear, even if it is easily read. One key element that suffers from considerable ambiguity is people’s names. Though a person is in isible, their name can change, is rarely unique and can be written in many ways. Yet knowing the people associated with data is incredibly useful. Data on people can be used to validate other data, simplify data capture, link together data across domains, reduce duplication-of-effort and facilitate data-gap-analysis. In addition, people data enable the discovery of in iduals unique to our collections, the collective charting of the history of scientific researchers and the provision of credit to the people who deserve it (Groom et al. 2020). We foresee a future where the people associated with collections are not ambiguous, are shared globally, and data of all kinds are linked through the people who generate them. The TDWG People in Bio ersity Data Task Group is therefore working on a guide to the disambiguation of people in natural history collections. The ultimate goal is to connect the various strings of characters on specimen labels and other documentation to persistent identifiers (PIDs) that unambiguously link a name “string” to the identity of a person. In working towards this goal, 150 volunteers in the Bionomia project have linked 21 million specimens to persistent identifiers for their collectors and determiners. An additional 2 million specimens with links to identifiers for people have already emerged directly from collections that make use of the recently ratified Darwin Core terms recordedByID and identifiedByID. Furthermore, the CETAF Botany Pilot conducted among a group of European herbaria and museums has connected over 1.4 million specimens to disambiguated collectors (Güntsch et al. 2021). Still, given the estimated 2 billion (Ariño 2010) natural history specimens globally, there is much more disambiguation to be done. The process of disambiguation starts with a trigger, which is often the transcription of a specimen’s label data. Unambiguous identification of the collector may facilitate this transcription, as it offers knowledge of their biographical details and collecting habits, allowing us to infer missing information such as collecting date or locality. Another trigger might be the flagging of inconsistent data during data entry or resulting from data quality processes, revealing for instance that multiple collectors have been conflated. A disambiguation trigger is followed by the gathering of data, then the evaluation of the results and finally by the documentation of the new information. Disambiguation is not always straightforward and there are many pitfalls. It requires access to biographical data, and identifiers to be minted. In the case of living people, they have to cooperate with being disambiguated and we have to follow legal and ethical guidelines. In the case of dead people, particularly those long dead, disambiguation may require considerable research. We will present the progress made by the People in Bio ersity Data Task Group and their recommendations for disambiguation in collections. We want to encourage other institutions to engage with a global effort of linking people to persistent identifiers to collaboratively improve all collection data.
No related grants have been discovered for David Peter Shorthouse.