This thread will capture the questions that arose during and after the support hour for Nodes.
Question 1: can the IPT give an error message if the extensions (or cores) require to be updated?
A common issue node staff encounter is that they are not able to update and republish a dataset in the IPT if the core and extensions are not up to date. However, they do not get an error warning when they initiate the publishing process and we have therefore created an issue in GitHub so an error message eventually can be included in the publication process.
Question 2: can more than one projectID be added to a dataset or individual records?
There is currently an open issue on the topic and we encourgae you to engage in the discussion in GitHub. Some of the considerations so far is whether to have projectIDs by individual records (with potentially multiple IDs per record).
Question 3: how can you contribute to develop the controlled vocabularies in GBIF for internal interpretation of verbatim values?
GBIF and the GBIF community are generating controlled vocabularies to improve the internal interpretation of verbatim values supplied by the data publishers. The controlled vocabularies will increase the amount of standardized interpreted records in GBIF and make the vocabularies more flexible for interpretation to other languages. If you would like to contribute to the development of the initial controlled vocabularies, please refer to the guidelines. The occurrence vocabularies with a high prioritization are the first to be developed.
Question 4: are there any GBIF recommended controlled vocabularies?
GBIF follows the recommendation of the TDWG community and an overview is available here for some Darwin Core terms. OBIS also recommends the NERC vocabularies.
Question 5: Could you tell us a bit more about networks?
On GBIF, the network entity can be used to link datasets and gather metrics in the context of ongoing collaborations. A network page has a presentation page (managed in Contentful) as well as a tab for the publishers whose datasets contribute to the network, a list of contributing datasets, a tab for occurrence metrics as well as a link to the occurrence and citations for the data contributing to the network. See for example, the TrIAS network page: Tracking Invasive Alien Species (TrIAS). Networks can be centrally curated in the GBIF registry. Alternatively, each dataset can register to a network from an IPT. A dataset can be part of several network.Networks are also used in the context of GBIF Hosted portals (GBIF hosted portals) as they allow to gather occurrences of otherwise unrelated datasets.Not everyone can create a network. For example, networks aren’t meant for fixed term projects and we would avoid creating a network if there is another way to aggregate the same occurrences (for example all the datasets from a given publisher). You must have a use case to ask for the creation of a network. If you are interested or have any question, please contact helpdesk@gbif.org.