Question about basisOfRecord

[JeannetteHo1]

I am new to Darwin Core. My library is planning to create a collection of digitized images of preserved vertebrate specimens. We plan to upload a .csv spreadsheet of metadata terms from both Dublin Core and selected terms from Darwin Core (which I understood we can do since Darwin Core is an extension of Dublin Core).

I was looking at the slides from the intro to Darwin Core webinar at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CZ5Jf9qm4WCLOJpyfqLuKKP9InkT2JUqxwD2-gFumfA/edit#slide=id.g1cc849336f_0_393. On Slide 20, there is an image of a spreadsheet with Darwin Core terms, with different columns containing fields that relate to the "event," "occurrence," "location," etc.

We too would like to use selected terms that relate to more than one category. The person who is going to be inputting the data used basisOfRecord "preservedSpecimen" for a past project. But this doesn't sound correct with the the approach we are taking.

Since the csv spreadsheet weare preparing for the metadata will include terms for more than one category, should we omit "basisOfRecord" in our .csv metadata? Since we are not only using terms associated with preservedSpecimen but also occurrence (e.g., "catalogNumber)" and others as well?

[tucotuco]

Hi @JeannetteHo1 It is great to hear that you have a good use for Darwin Core. Darwin Core records almost always consist of fields from multiple categories (classes). For example, a combination of the place information from Location (a class borrowed from Dublin Core, by the way) with the species information of the Taxon class and with the date information from the Event class provides the What, When and Where of a species Occurrence (a la Darwin Core). The basisOfRecord is meant to guide the consumer of the record about what is behind the record. For example, can they expect to inquire of the record custodian to get a loan of a bird skin? If the basisOfRecord is PreservedSpecimen, that would be a reasonable expectation. In your case you have the images, but I presume you don't have the specimens to loan. In that case your records are based on a (Dublin Core) StillImage, which would be the value to use for dc:type. Because the dc:type would be a StillImage, the basisOfRecord, which is the Darwin Core corollary of dc:type, would be MachineObservation.

You might also consider provided information about the media you are capturing using Audubon Core (https://tdwg.github.io/ac/guide/).

You can find more discussion on specific aspects of the basisOfRecord discussion in the issues
#62 and #134.

If you haven't seen it already, the page on Simple Darwin Core (https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/wiki/Simple-Darwin-Core) might be useful also, not so much for basisOfRecord, but for how to think of Darwin Core records and extending them.