Comments on: Interoperability in sharing species data

By: Bruce Miller

Bruce Miller — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:35:56 +0000

Species analyst is certainly interesting but the ephemeral nature of web sites precluded linking to this as the site was often down and not available to search key museum data. When the sytem was first posted by KU it was great, but now either the links are dead or the functionality no longer works.
Short lived but useful concept.

By: Liam

Liam — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 07:37:00 +0000

It strikes me this would be somewhere a semi-intelligent agent, either in software, hardware, or some combination thereof to help convert and input data from one medium or format to another would be very useful. It seems that no one is willing to finance the leg work that would be required to manually transform the data. Financing a tool that anyone could run to transform and submit local datato a central database seems like it would be an effective means of overcoming some of the difficulties.

It would some logical that when trying to convert large amounts of data into a new format, convenient and automated tools to convert the old formats to the new would be among the first things released. Even for the physical cataloguing, it seems like it’s a very repetitive, fairly basic task which would be an excellent candidate for automation.

Of course, I’ll some huge fraction of the worlds electronic data is stored in Excel spreadsheets rather than in an actual database, so I suppose I am getting the cart before the horse.

By: Hannah

Hannah — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 13:50:49 +0000

I wonder if they’ll eventually have compulsory datasharing, so instead of volunteering one’s computer over to
Species Analyst, you’ll be required to and in return you can use the internet. You know how they are slapping on
extra taxes for technology to recover damage to the environment, this could also be a nonmonetary cost of using the technology.