Looking for suggestions to help client incorporate species data
Cyndie Found
It was suggested by Thomson Reuters to one of our DataCite Canada clients that they include some of their species data in the metadata they provide to Datacite. The client is interested in doing so but is uncertain as to the best way to proceed.
The request from TR was :
I work on the Data Citation Index for Thomson Reuters and I would like to investigate the possibility of harvesting your metadata through the Datacite OAI service to include in the product. Before I do this though, I’m wondering if you would consider adding the organisms included in your online records to the metadata you are already providing to Datacite. Example from record AAA9942:
We feel that the addition of these would be of great benefit to our users and would increase the chances of them choosing to use a dataset from this collection in the course of their research. How feasible would this be?
A suggestion was made that the client could use the Subject field in the DataCite Metadata Scheme V 3.0 and simply enter:
Species: Prostoia similis
Species: Prostoia sp. MLS
Etc.
The client felt this was a little clunky and wondered what other options could be suggested. Their exact words:
I have been looking for ways to expand the metadata we include and am happy to add as much information as we can. However, I would like to have a broader discussion about how best to format the data before taking action. Using the subject field seems a bit clunky, are there other fields we could use or can we extend the subject field with sub-tags?. My hope is that we summarize the datasets and include geographic, species, and genetic information. Additionally, I would like to link them to associated manuscripts to improve linking and discovery.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Can anyone in this group help with some advice or ideas?
Thanks in advance!!
Cyndie (DataCite Canada)
Joan Starr
In the most recent version update to the metadata schema, we added a mechanism to address this issue. Clients can, in effect, extend the DataCite metadata with any additional domain-specific metadata by using the relatedIdentifier, relationType=HasMetadata combination. They use this to point to an external metadata file with any amount of additional metadata. If you look at the documentation, it provides examples of how to do this.
We took this approach because we want to avoid building into the schema any specific domain's requirements. I hope you can see the logic of this.
Let us know if you think this will address your question.
Best,
Joan Starr
Chair, DataCite Metadata Working Group