SpeciesPages

At TDWG2008 in Fremantle there was a Wild Ideas session where people could propose crazy things that might not be serious or urgent. RogerHyam did a presentation call SpeciesIndex?: A practical alternative to fantasy mashups. This was meant to be a bit of fun but actually went down quiet well with the audience so this page is created to formalise the idea and see if we can move it to an actual implementation. (The abstract of the talk is here though the actual talk varied from it a bit. The PowerPoint? of the talk is here and their is a flash movie with audio here)

Summary

Definitions

Species Page

A species page is a single web page describing a named species taxon. It contains descriptive information about the species such as morphology, ecology, geography, uses etc. It may include text and/or still and moving images and/or sound files. The information may be free standing or may be interpreted in context of other pages in which case it is obvious from the presentation that this is the case. Analogs to species pages in the physical world are entries for species in encyclopedias, floras, faunas and guide books. Questions that SpeciesPages help Users answer are: Given a name what kind of organism is this? What does it look like? How does it live? Where can I find it? Is it endangered? Given a specimen how can I confirm its identity? Does this match the descriptive data given in the page? Species pages contain more than one piece of information about the species - they are compiled works. A single photograph is not therefore a species page but a photograph with notes pointing out why the specimen in the photograph should be consider a particular species would count as a species page. Generally species pages are only existed for taxa that are considered accepted by the Publisher. If they exist for non-accepted taxa (e.g. synonymous taxa) then they are clearly linked to the accepted taxa.

User

Some one who wants to do either of two things: Find information about a species based on its name or some other discovery mechanism or unambiguously describe which species taxon they mean by citing a SpeciesPage URL in addition to the species name. e.g. "I saw a specimen of Aus bus that matched the description at this URL." This is useful because it clarifies the use of a plain species name which can be misleading or confusing. It is similar to a scientist accurately citing the method used to obtain the results of an experiment.

Publisher

Some one (possibly an institution or project) who has created one or more SpeciesPages and shares their locations with Users by producing a SiteMap and registering the SiteMap with a Species Index Register.

SiteMap

A file conforming to the SiteMaps Protocol that contains a list of URLs for SpeciesPages and only SpeciesPages.

Species Index Register

An application that manages a list of SiteMap files so that Indexers can index the SpeciesPages and help Users find them.

Indexer

An application that helps Users find SpeciesPages from Publishers and helps Publishers expose their SpeciesPages to Users. A minimal implementation of an Indexer would just provide a search box for species names and return a list of SpeciesPages in a random order. A more sophisticated Indexer would provide more information and rank SpeciesPages base on their content. A fully developed Indexer may feed back to Publishers on how they can improve their SpeciesPages and provide metrics to Users on whether they should trust the Publishers.

Publishers

Instructions for Publishers

1. Generate a SiteMap file for your species pages. This is easy. You can read the SiteMaps protocol itself and/or you can visit the excellent Google Webmaster Tools site (registration required). Other search engines may provide similar tools. SiteMaps are very widely used web technology so any competent web developer should be able to help you.
2. Register the location of your SiteMap with one or more Species Index Registrar (The first one is here...).
3. Consider improving the meta tags on your species pages so the indexers can do a better job. See SpeciesPagesMetaTags for more discussion on this.

Notes for Publishers

• Your SiteMap file should only contain URLs for your SpeciesPages. It should not be a general SiteMap file for your website. Indexers have to be able to rely on the SiteMaps registered with them only containing URLs to SpeciesPages. If an Indexer notices that your SiteMap contains other pages they will likely drop all your SpeciesPages from their index.
• You should try to obey the rules on the location of your SiteMap file in the standard but if you can not do this for some reason you can place your SiteMap at any web accessible location. The danger with not following the standard is that the indexer can not automatically tell that the owner of the SiteMap is the same as the owner of the species pages. There is therefore a chance that indexers will ignore your SiteMap and so also ignore your SpeciesPages. Another downside is that the validation tools supplied by Google will also fail.

Species Index Registrars

• The contents of any register of SiteMaps should be made readily available for download by other registrars or Indexers using CSV, RSS or some similar encoding. This should allow SiteMaps that have been registered with one registrar to be propagated to other registrars.
• Registrars should publish the existence of other registrars to Users who register their SiteMaps with them so that Users can ensure their SiteMaps are registered in multiple locations.

Discussion

Trust and Junk

A Web Page Isn't a Taxon Concept

SiteMaps or something similar?

SiteMaps seem to me to have a key weakness for our purpose. SiteMaps give us no obvious standard way to identify the species addressed by a given page. We are therefore left to rely upon determining this dynamically (based presumably on the title, most frequent names in the page, etc.) or by defining some tags which providers should ideally include in the headers of the pages or something similar.

Since the critical question for us is knowing which species is covered by each page, and since these SiteMaps are not going to be suitable for all of the normal purposes of a SiteMap, should we just take the bull by the horns and mandate our own simple *SiteMap*-like format for this purpose? This could for example be a document with two standard columns, one for the URL and one for the taxon name, and perhaps with a third optional column so publishers can provide a set of keywords indicating the types of content in the pages (for example as a comma-separated set of SPM categories).

-- DonaldHobern - 06 Nov 2008

Sitemaps, in their XML form, are nicely extensible with other namespaces so we could add DwC? or other vocabularies directly in the SiteMap?. We could also make up our own CSV format with columns for different things as you suggest. The problem with this approach is that it puts a burden on the publisher to maintain two things; the web pages and the sitemap/index file.

On the other hand putting something in the pages themselves is done synchronously with updating the pages and is more likely to occur. Even if the pages are generated from a database there is only one template to maintain not two (one for the pages and one for the more complex sitemap).

Here I have suggested that we move to capturing more semantically rich content in the page header using the recognised DC way of doing it but I think even this may be too difficult for people. Consider some one using wiki or some other CMS software to generate their species accounts. It may be more appropriate to take the Wikipedia Taxobox approach in such cases. These people may have difficulty building a regular SiteMap? as well.

All this aside I think that semantic mark up of the pages (even to the degree of indicating a standard name format) is "phase 2". First build a list of the pages then work out what we need to do to make them more semantically rich.

-- RogerHyam 2008-11-6

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