discipline

[wouteraddink]

New term: discipline

• Submitter: Wouter Addink (Naturalis), Sharif Islam (Naturalis), Maxime Griveau (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle), Sam Leeflang (Naturalis), Anton Güntsch (BGBM), Ana Casino (CETAF), Jutta Buschbom (NHM UK, Statistical Genetics DE)

• Efficacy Justification (why is this term necessary?):
  DarwinCore is often used to exchange specimen data. Specimens require discipline specific (meta-)data: a herbarium specimen requires other data than a geological specimen or fossil specimen. It is therefore important to know from what discipline the specimen is, for example to assess whether the required metadata is present that is needed for the specimen to be of scientific use.

Currently DwC:basisOfRecord is used for this purpose in the absence of a better DwC term. But this term is not suitable, since it records data on a different, complementary dimension of information and can also not easily be changed to a controlled vocabulary without affecting current implementations. There seems to be community consensus that a discipline based classification is the best way for a generic high-level classification since the scientific discipline determines what metadata is recorded and what metadata is needed for research in that discipline.

Discipline as a term is also included in LatimerCore for use at the collection-level, and can be used to describe SpecimenType in MIDS. With the inclusion of a discipline term in DwC, SpecimenType can be better described than by using basisOfRecord and it would become possible to classify specimens both at the object and at the collection level (DwC/MIDS and LtC) with the same values, and use a controlled vocabulary for this purpose. This makes it possible for example to show which collections contain specimens of a certain type and how many of these are digitally available. It is not always enough to specify discipline at collection or DwC dataset level since it may contain specimens from multiple disciplines.

• Demand Justification (name at least two organizations that independently need this term):
  All DiSSCo facilities (over 200 institutions in Europe including e.g. BGBM Berlin, MNHN France, UTartu, Senckenberg ) will need this term to provide data for their specialisation plans and to provide data for the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS). MNHN France needs this to construct ELViS and CETAF needs it for their collection register.

• Stability Justification (what concerns are there that this might affect existing implementations?):
  This is an additional term and therefore does not affect existing implementations, however it allows implementations to move from basisOfRecord to discipline to better describe specimenType, which is a metadata element in MIDS and therefore needed to minimally describe a specimen.

• Implications for dwciri: namespace (does this change affect a dwciri term version)?:
  There should be a dwciri term for the term discipline as well with a recommended best practice to use a controlled vocabulary. dwciri:discipline

Proposed attributes of the new term:

• Term name (in lowerCamelCase for properties, UpperCamelCase for classes):
  discipline

• Term label (English, not normative):
  Discipline

• Organized in Class (e.g., Occurrence, Event, Location, Taxon):
  this term may fit best at the record-Level

• Definition of the term (normative):
  The main scientific discipline for which the specimen or occurrence is recorded.

• Usage comments (recommendations regarding content, etc., not normative):
  This term can be used to classify specimens or occurrences where basisOfRecord is not detailed enough to classify them. It is recommended to use this field to describe specimenType in MIDS and to use a controlled vocabulary for this term.

• Examples (not normative):
  Botany, Zoology, Microbiology, Anthropology, Earth Geology, Astrogeology, Palaeontology, Ecology, Other Biodiversity, Other Geodiversity, Unclassified. Note that the suggestion is to use a controlled vocabulary with further definition of the terms, for example Ecology would be used for, e.g., eDNA and soil samples but not for herbarium specimens which would have Botany as discipline.

• Refines (identifier of the broader term this term refines; normative):

• Replaces (identifier of the existing term that would be deprecated and replaced by this term; normative):

• ABCD 2.06 (XPATH of the equivalent term in ABCD or EFG; not normative):
  RecordBasis uses a vocabulary based on DwC: basisOfRecord, however this vocabulary is not enforced. A new term with a controlled vocabulary would be needed in ABCD to support discipline.

[dshorthouse]

I see this is proposed as a record-level term to sit alongside other terms like type, rightsHolder, institutionID, and the like. I also see reference to occurrences and specimens in the definition. Can/should the definition for discipline made to be more generic, without using the term itself in the definition, nor reference to occurrence or specimen just as other record-level terms do not?

Perhaps something more like:

The primary branch of knowledge represented by the record.

[dshorthouse]

Would taxonomy be a term in the controlled vocabulary for discipline? What values would you expect to see for records with a dwc:basisOfRecord = Event, MaterialCitation, or Taxon?

[CecSve]

GBIF currently have discipline in GRSciColl for institutions based on a controlled vocabulary. We have the following open tickets for adding concepts: gbif/vocabulary#153 and gbif/vocabulary#164.

[wouteraddink]

Hi David, I see the main use cases in collections and occurrence records, what would be the use case for having taxonomy as discipline? Having a more generic definition is fine with me.

The controlled vocabulary GBIF has recently developed is different from the one established by the European collections community in the SYNTHESYS+ project (and further refined in the DiSSCo Prepare project). This is the one DiSSCo, CETAF and some institutions in Europe have implemented. It would be nice if they would be compatible, although a user can choose any controlled vocabulary for the term. We can make them compatible if Botany and Astrogeology are added to the GBIF vocabulary, which is broader and hierarchical. I will add a request to GBIF for Astrogeology (for Botany there are already the tickets Cecilie mentioned).

For those interested about the rationale for having a more limited set of terms as implemented by DiSSCo and others:
This has the advantage that the set of data to expect for each of them is also different, so the category can be added automatically based on some terms in the data record being present or absent. It is also useful for application developers, as they then know better what kind of data to expect and can used different templates tailored for each discipline. And it aligns with current basisOfRecord DwC usage, so it is easier for users to adopt. It also simplifies dashboards that visualise a dataset or corpus of datasets based on discipline.