Among the various ways of providing data to the catalogue that have been mentioned in this and other topics of this consultation the integration with CDMS would be my preferred route to go.
I would like to be able to manage collection information (that is then channeled to this catalogue or other destinations) seamlessly with information on the specimens that make up these collections. Once a collection is defined in terms of the specimens that are its constituent parts or other criteria I would want automatic updates of information aggregated on the level of the collection based on the specimen-level information and I would like to be able to configure automatic publication of that collection-level data.
I would not want to compile, manage and export data on the collections’ level with a second independent system.
This might be especially useful for the wider data linkages based on aggregated specimen data and corresponding services disussed in topics 2.5 and 2.6, respectively.
Also, when collections are defined according to intensional criteria, e.g., all specimens collected by a particular collector, then such integration would automatically pick up on updated knowledge about the specimens - we expect that digitization will expose a lot of such hitherto unknown specimen properties.