What descriptive information should be considered mandatory or desirable for each Collection?
Mandatory:
- a human readible informative collection name
- holding institution including contact information (weblink, email, phone, address
- information on how to cite the collection (as this appears to be an important motivation for establishing the catalogue)
- source of the information in the record
- last update
Desirable:
- a short, human-readable description of the collection
- collection metrics (e.g., number of specimens)
- identifiers for the collection (e.g., acronyms, codes)
- links to representations of the collection and/or its specimens
- links to related collections
How much of this information needs to be normalised for machine processing (rather than just for human readers)?
All of the information should be made available both for human consumption and machine processing according to linked data principles. Depending on the use cases and their priorization the latter might be tackled in a second step, after gaining community acceptance.