We have momentum and interests about DES and the services we are piloting. This will take some time. In the next few months we will be talking with GBIF and iDigBio to see how we can broaden our scope for the pilot.
The community annotation and curation services can provide the following advantages:
- The institutions and the CMS can keep their infrastructure and data model but still take advantage of new annotations and enrichment (of course, some adjustments need to be made on the CMS side to receive the data).
- Introduction of the persistent identifiers at the digital specimen and annotation level provides granularity and linking of different digital objects.
- These objects can provide the base for large scale data quality checks and annotation services. Here’s a test annotation digital object with a PID. Serialisation of such records (JSON or JSON-LD form) can be fed back to the CMS or other systems. Some of the basic data checks and annotations can easily be automated.
- We can also use these identifiers for data citation, attribution (we are also thinking about authentication, authorisation, trust and verification methods for these annotation objects which also will not be easy).
However, we still need a few basic things in place.
As @abentley already pointed out – collections staff and the museums do not have the capacity to do some of these data clean up tasks. Automating and opening up the records will help. And it is easy to say FAIR this and FAIR that. But most museums do not have proper data steward roles and relevant data management training. DiSSCo will help with some of these capacity building but each institutions and the funding agencies need to support more data management tasks. With these training and capacity as foundation, we will start seeing the benefit of community curation or annotation at scale.