The ideas paper and discussion questions seem to be presenting conflicting information about whether GBIF sees itself as a competitor or collaborator with existing biodiversity portals and collections catalogs. On the one hand, the website sketch suggests the goal of GBIF as a one-stop shop for all information in the biodiversity knowledge graph, to the exclusion of any value for data portals at small to medium levels of aggregation. On the other hand, the consultation materials suggest that GBIF is not seeking to take over all the services and duties of existing collections catalogues and biodiversity data portals. In the first webinar, for example, Dr. Hobern described the project goal as “a single, unified global catalog of the world’s natural history collections, while at the same time supporting the different activities, the different networks, the different communities that are already effectively managing such catalogs for their own space…”
In this regard, I want to highlight that the benefits of information sharing do not require nor are always best served by a centralized repository. The word “unified” here is ambiguous in this respect in potentially problematic ways. Contreras and Reichman (2015) present a useful set of alternative designs for data commons that are equally applicable to a catalogue of collections. Their analysis is motivated by a reflection on a failed initiative by the Belmont Forum that foundered on the high costs of a fully centralized repository. They describe two other alternative models, “intermediate” and “fully” distributed data sharing, and suggest these may have provided a better fit to their original needs. Achieving the benefits of a pooled collections catalogue resource is not equivalent to unification in the sense of centralization.
Contreras, Jorge L, and Jerome H Reichman. 2015. “Sharing by Design: Data and Decentralized Commons.” Science 350 (6266). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 1312–14. doi:10.1126/science.aaa7485.