Tapir, LSIDs and TDWG and what it all means...

More on the categorising of flora and fauna. Following on from my post of 1st May, here, a discussion with Paul and Lynda has clarified a bit more about what all the acronyms mean and what the plans for the future are.

LSIDs are a categorising system that sets out to bring digital collections management in biodiversity up to a web 2.0 standard. Ideally it replaces and encompasses the two previous standards for flora and fauna, makes the data accessible and searchable, and allows much greater aggregation of data.
In a practical sense, what this means is that you can search for and find an object (which can be an actual specimen, but not only a specimen!), and then, using its LSID, locate other objects related to it by location, by species, by characteristics, by institution, or by any information that is conveyed by the LSID.

To borrow from the LSID website:

Every LSID consists of up to five parts: the Network Identifier (NID); the root DNS name of the issuing authority; the namespace chosen by the issuing authority; the object id unique in that namespace; and finally an optional revision id for storing versioning information. Each part is separated by a colon to make LSIDs easy to parse.

So what does this do for the biodiversity community? Well, if museums et al take up the system, it means that all this data is available online: for research purposes, for species monitoring, for mapping and locating endangered and rare species, and so enabling a greater and more immediate response to management and planning for the future. Again, the Hennes article comes to mind, with its discussion about the future possibilities for museums and their collections.

How is it implemented?
Unlike other online cataloguing systems, this would be applied at the level of the institution. If the institution already has a DOI system in place, it may need tweaking to comply with LSID standards. The internal museum system would not have to be changed, however, as the LSID is divided into component parts (described above).
It is overseen by TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval)
As the website says:

TAPIR combines and extends features of the BioCASe and DiGIR protocols to create a new and more generic means of communication between client applications and data providers using the Internet.

So, TAPIR oversees the implementation of the protocol. If you feel brave enough to tackle a sea of acronyms you can check out the TAPIR wiki.

Please let me know if any of this is inaccurate, i have done my best to put it in layperson terms. Conceptually it sounds like a great idea to me. We also discussed The machine is eating us, as an example of a great way to convey what are conceptually complicated ideas in a simple, effective, interesting format. Are there other, successful ways to deal with these issues in a very short timeframe? that is the upcoming challenge.

'Hyperconnection' and Tom Hennes

Interesting article about the future of natural history museums, and their necessary evolution from position of detached documentation of the world around them, to a position of engagement and interconnection.
Hennes talks about the need for museums to find a niche for themselves within their community, and to engage with the urgent issues of the 21st century - the changes in the world's ecosystems and the corresponding effect on biodiversity. He sees natural history museums as being ideally placed, with their bodies of knowledge about their collections, to take an active role in current research:

Science has awakened to the storehouse of biodiversity maintained in the millions of specimens stored in natural history museums, and is using this wealth of data to track long term change and support surveys of endangered areas.

An example is the development by Naturalis (the Dutch National Museum of Natural History)of joint programmes with environmental organisations. They have established a Dutch biodiversity register, and a student educational website.

The Australian Museum has established a joint project with Rio Tinto called Biomaps, a project to produce an interactive web based mapping system to show where biodiversity data is held in Australia and overseas.

There is also a move to create a digital object labelling system called LSID (Life Science Identifiers, a version of GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers) which provide a unique identification system. Here is a link for more info on this, and info on other types of digital object identification systems can be found here.

There has been a lot of discussion on this issue of digital identification. As Wikipedia describes it:

A DOI can apply to any form of intellectual property expressed in any digital environment. Intellectual property includes both physical and digital manifestations, performances and abstract works: DOIs can be used to identify e-texts, images, audio or video items, software, etc. An entity can be identified at any arbitrary level of granularity. This means that, for instance, DOIs can identify a journal, an individual issue of a journal, an individual article in the journal, or a single table in that article.

This really is getting to the nitty gritty detail of the digital world - and I thought the internet was an unruly swirling mass of digital data!