Agents and References

[nielsklazenga]

Side note: Emerging from the CoL meeting was a renewed interest on creating a workflow to generate "clean" data buckets for literature and for agents (specifically agents as authors of literature). We may want to farm that out to an entirely separate group, but every time we've done that in the past it gets neglected and/or abandoned. Because Literature/Agents are of such fundamental importance to TNU-space, I think an argument could be made to include it within the scope of this effort. But another argument could be made to spin it off as a separate discussion group. I favor the former, but in any case, this will require minimally a set of separate issues. (i.e., we don't want to dwell on it here). I'll leave it to someone else to create the appropriate issue, as I'm still a GitHub noob.

Originally posted by @deepreef in https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/issues/47#issuecomment-599305367

[nielsklazenga]

Regarding literature and agents, I agree on how essential they are to us and am happy for the TNC to take that on, but I don't want it to delay the publication of the draft standard (for which we are aiming for September). So I will open the GitHub issue and we might dedicate a TNC meeting to it, where we can see how much time it is likely to take and whether we can include it in our current work, or do it afterwards. I know that there is some work going on within TDWG on at least agents.

Originally posted by @nielsklazenga in https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/issues/47#issuecomment-599313115

[nielsklazenga]

@nielsklazenga : I agree that the References/Agents components should come after we've locked in a decent draft of the Taxon Names/Usages/etc. standard.

A group is forming consisting of CoL-Folk, PLAZI-Folk, WoRMS-Folk, ZooBank-Folk, and other interested parties. A lot of that discussion will happen within the Bibliography of Life space (managed by PLAZI), but that will be more about workflow and content generation/cleanup. I think the standards discussion should take place within this TNC space.

Originally posted by @deepreef in https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/issues/47#issuecomment-599322092

[mdoering]

To me the biggest drawback of TCS and an important blocker for its take up was the lack of standard for exchanging references. Other placeholder like specimens were bad too, but not as important. Even if references are not the intellectual core of this group, exchanging data without references will simply not work. If it's supposed to be an exchange standard someone needs to provide a definition.

[deepreef]

Agreed!

[afuchs1]

I also agree, even if we have to do a two level standard to handle exchange when existing systems can and cannot support an increased level of granularity (much as we do for other data).

[nielsklazenga]

Then let's talk about what to do about it at our next meeting. I don't think it should be all that much work as we can just do an application profile on top of existing standards/ontologies (and anything not in there we can put in this standard, as that would have to be very specific to us).

[ianengelbrecht]

Are there existing standards for references and agents that could be adopted or extended? I'm aware of https://schema.org/Person and https://schema.org/CreativeWork but there may be others.

[deepreef]

One that I and a number of other people have followed is FOAF

Edit: I think maybe "drawn from" is a better description than "followed", in this context.

[deepreef]

Note that for agents, I strongly recommend that we define two separate classes: Agent and AgentName. Instances of the Agent class would (in my view) fall into one of several mutually-exclusive subclasses, minimally including Person and Organization (but perhaps also "Group" or "Team", and possibly other collectives besides "Organization"). Properties of Agent instances include things like birthDate, deathDate, and maybe a few others of interest/relevance to our community.

Instances of AgentName are text-string labels applied to Agent instances, typically parsed to givenName and familyName for Agents that are of subclass Person, and parsed into something like fullName and shortName for organizations/groups.

There are many other details to sort out, and I hope to kick off this discussion in more detail later this month.

[nielsklazenga]

Wikidata already does exactly that, i.e. having agent names as objects (or Item in Wikidata), although Wikidata has items for family name and given names, the labels of which can be concatenated to the Agent Item label. There is, however, a point where, in the biodiversity community, we stop being interested and I think that is right at the Agent object (for me personally – and I think for the TNC – it is a bit earlier than that, at the Reference). This sounds to me like the choice between a SKOS label and a SKOS extended label (https://github.com/tdwg/tag/issues/22).

The TDWG/RDA Attribution Interest Group (https://github.com/tdwg/attribution) is very much into Agents. I think we should leave Agents to them and focus on other parts of the Reference.

[mdoering]

For references BibTex, BibJSON and CSL-JSON come to my mind. Having used CSL-JSON lately I am shocked by the lack of standardisation. I value the proven simplicity of BibTex, but its lack of author lists and normalised journals is bad. BibJSON is an improvement here.

You can retrieve metadata for all CrossRef, DataCite and mEDRA DOIs in CSL-JSON and BibTex which is a big advantage. See https://citation.crosscite.org/docs.html#sec-4 for other supported formats:

curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/database/baw125

curl -LH "Accept: application/vnd.citationstyles.csl+json" http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/database/baw125

See also https://github.com/rdmpage/bibliographic-metadata-json and discussions at https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/general/issues/23

[mdoering]

MODS XML is also still active

[WUlate]

I've also seen Librarians talking "RIS", "a standardized tag format [created specifically] to enable citation programs to exchange data and supported by a number of reference managers", though I'm not sure if it's been superceded by any of the more recent standards.

[nielsklazenga]

Closing this for now...