Environment Measurements Extension Concept List

This document lists the proposed concepts of a new Environment Measurements Extension following the DarwinCore approach. This extension is being proposed as a means of recording environment conditions associated to an event.

Status:

• First version (0.1) of XML schema schema finished. Ready for testing.

Submitted by: Etienne Cartolano, Tereza Giannini, Renato De Giovanni, Antonio Saraiva and Pedro Pizzigatti.

Submitted: 22 June 2007

Development of this extension was supported in part by the Pollinators Thematic Network of the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) and by the Pollination Information Management System of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Comments & suggestions:

I strongly recommend not continuing to extended DwC?? in this manner. You can only do so much in a flat schema. An RDF based approach similar to that used in the TAG.LSIDVocs would be more appropriate.

What external vocabularies have been considered for use here? I feel their must be established meteorology standards available that should, perhaps be reused though I don't have experience in this area.

From a content perspective the value of this kind of information when not linked to well defined protocols appears dubious. A pollination study, for example, might record details of the micro climates associated with the actual flowers being pollinated. A more ecological study might take standard measurements from instruments in a Stevenson screen. How close to the pollination event are the measurements taken? What height etc etc. Is it safe to combine data from two different studies like this? If the schema is only suitable for communicating within a study then it isn't a general purpose transfer schema. Should this be done in EML or some other technology?

-- RogerHyam 2007-09-06

comments:

I certainly agree that this particular extension is a very basic prototype that would need more work before being considered general enough. We tried to make this clear in the "status" of the extension above. It may be the case that other existing vocabularies/standards could better serve our needs. There was not enough time to do more investigation and we thought it would be more reasonable for now to follow the same approach being taken in the other extensions (interaction and pollination).

-- RenatoDeGiovanni 2007-09-07