CHAH HISCOM meeting, November 2011

Minutes joint CHAH/HISCOM meeting, Perth, 8 November 2011

Welcome by David Cantrill

Attendance and apologies
Attending: Murray Henwood, Brendan Lepschi, Ailsa Holland, Darren Crayn, Brett Summerell, Aaron Wilton, Laurence Paine, Ian Cowie, Patrick Brownsey, David Cantrill, Ilse Breitwieser, Helen Thompson, Jim Croft, Kevin Thiele, Greg Whitbread, Michelle Waycott, Niels Klazenga, Gintaras Kantvilas, Ben Richardson, Alison Vaughan

ALA observers: Bryan Kalms, Bryn Kingsford

Apologies: Andy Lowe, Ewan Cameron, Gordon Guymer, Mike Preece, Donna Lewis

Minutes from last meeting:
No comments, passed. Thanks to Deirdre.

Actions from last meeting:

ALA collaboration position papers ? see item 6.

HISCOM Terms of Reference
See HISCOM minutes.

There was a recommendation to make a HISCOM member the chair of HISCOM, and for the deputy chair to be a member of CHAH. Aaron Wilton was nominated as chair, subject to line manager approval; Brett Summerell was nominated deputy chair.

Action: Terms of Reference to be changed accordingly (see HISCOM meeting minutes for formulation).

The timing of meetings, and whether the overlap of HISCOM/FCIG/CHAH/CHAFC/MAHC meetings is beneficial, was discussed. We still think it is a good idea to have an overlap between HISCOM and CHAH meetings. There are planning difficulties associated with having so many parallel meetings. Much tighter agendas are needed, so that meetings can be run more efficiently.

Recommendation: That CHAH/HISCOM meetings should be scheduled in the same week, and that we should continue to have a joint CHAH/HISCOM meeting. HISCOM/CHAH meetings should preferably be scheduled after the TDWG meeting.

HISCOM report
The recommendations and action items from the HISCOM meeting were reviewed. Comments on certain actions and recommendations are noted below:

Action 2: CHAH is waiting on advice on privacy issues, and can’t enter into a data agreement with ALA until those issues are clarified. It is hoped that they will be resolved at meetings this week. HISCOM emphasised that the development of the AVH hub is hampered by the data set they have to work with, and this needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

Resolution: To expose all our data including collectors’ and determiners’ names.

Action: To ask MAHC that accession agreements include a clause advising people that collecting and other specimen-related information, including people’s names, will be made publicly available.

Recommendation 14: That the urgency of this issue is emphasised.

Recommendation 17: The view from the HISCOM meeting was that the registration of names is both good and inevitable, and that it would be prudent for CHAH to be actively engaged in this space.

Action 17: It was acknowledged that MAHC also need online collaboration and record-keeping, and that a joint solution should be found, if possible.

Relationship with NZVH
NZVH is on holding pattern at the moment and hasn’t had any funding for the past year. They are in preparation for the next phase and are looking for opportunities to get funding to carry NZVH forward.

Integrating NZVH with New Zealand Access Federation is due to happen in next couple of weeks.

Data mobilisation is a big challenge: the AVH hub needs to be aware that it is very important to remind providers that data sets need to be updated after the first upload. VH administrators need to provide a lot of support to help smaller institutions manage their data mobilisation.

The requirements for NZVH are still in line with those for AVH, and NZ hopes to adopt whatever comes from the ALA AVH hub.

ALA
John provided an update on ALA roadmap documents:


 * AVH hosting: has had considerable discussion at the HISCOM meeting
 * Project contribution plan: with David and Donald at the moment; progress is subject to outcomes of privacy discussions
 * Resources of Australian Herbaria (RAH) data capture tool: the resource has been built so that it can be edited by authorised people in each institution (it is being worked on at the moment and will be available early next year)
 * Mobilising data from university herbaria: Intersect built tools to get data out of smaller institutions; they have been tested to a point, but data has not yet been mobilised as an MoU with CHAH has not been prepared. Bryn is keen to get this moving again.
 * GPI project: ALA has given over $1 million in funding to imaging projects, about half of which is contracted to CHAH. Imaging equipment is due to arrive next week and will be installed over the next couple of months.
 * Imaging and image management: ALA proposed that the Atlas would facilitate the establishment of a working group that looks at how images can be managed consistently across the herbaria and the primary ways and means by which those images would be mobilised into the Atlas. The research done to date indicates that the capabilities within herbaria for managing images varies from clueless to quite sophisticated.The ALA has offered to provide each herbarium with up to $8,000 of hardware for image storage. Imaging resources are available on the ALA website. ALA is working with NSW to help set up their digital asset management system (DAMS), to define metadata fields and linkages between their DAMS system and EMu, and how to mobilise digital assets from the system. Bryn will share his work on image mobilisation and standards development with HISCOM.
 * Collectors and illustrators database: Currently waiting on some kind of guidance for how to proceed. Any serious development in this would have to be done by June 2012, though resources would be limited. HISCOM and CHAH agreed that this project is a low priority.
 * DNA and tissue management: ALA was asked to facilitate the development of standards for managing DNA and tissue management. Darren and Murray put together a position paper with suggestions for infrastructure that ALA could provide. HISCOM and CHAH agreed that this is a low priority given the limited timeframe. The DNA working group will continue to look at the issues, but it’s unlikely that there will be opportunities to work on this with ALA prior to June 2012. FCIG is currently looking at relating DNA sequences and images to specimens using Darwin Core. There are discussions with living collections and seedbank people in Melbourne next week to discuss a data model for sharing information. The proposed standard is based on ITF2 with some Darwin Core components put in. There is some concern among HISCOM that a separate solution is being sought, despite there being many issues in common with the sharing of specimen data.
 * Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL): BHL is creating a bidding system for nominating particular journals to be digitised, and for nominating which resources a given institution wants to scan. There is currently one scanner, located at Museum Victoria, and BHL people are in the process of working out how it can be used by other institutions. There is some documentation on the ALA website. A big gap in the BHL scanning is the in-copyright literature. CHAH members need to get the specifications for scanning from Ely before we can proceed with scanning in-house. Alison will liaise with Ely to get things moving again.

John Tann provided an overview on ALA developments:


 * ALA is currently delivering 27 million records
 * Information about collections is being presented through the collectory (in which you can see the amount of data that is being downloaded from your collection, a breakdown in the number of collections that have been digitised, and see an overview of data quality)
 * The spatial portal is a sophisticated tool for presenting information spatially; there are over 250 environmental layers available, as well as modelling tools
 * Work is continuing on the national species lists
 * The sensitive data service is operational and is currently filtering for records with sensitive conservation statuses; the rules for biosecurity and animal health sensitivity are still being worked out
 * Supporting IdentifyLife: Kevin provided an overview of IdentifyLife activities. The first phase of IdentifyLife concentrated on building systems that people could use to collaboratively create ID systems and keys, and they are now concentrating on populating IdentifyLife with data. CHAH is encouraged to support the creation of a bibliography of Australian keys. IdentifyLife will support DELTA-based projects by re-using the software developed by the ALA Delta project (http://bit.ly/vwf0Z6). It is not yet doing so because it is waiting for the release of this software.
 * Data quality: all data in ALA is subject to quality control analysis that identifies outliers, and other potential concerns, and allows users to annotate specimen records.

Donald is leaving the ALA at the end of January. He will be replaced by someone internally, at least throughout 2012. It’s important to ensure that CHAH retains some control over the future of ALA. There is an explicit ministerial expectation that CSIRO will continue to support the development of the ALA. The ALA is funded until June 2012, after which some project managers and developers will stay on. Is CHAH (as one of the partners involved in the ALA) happy that CSIRO intends to make a internal appointment?

The need for improved communication, transfer of knowledge and technical documentation of the AVH hub was reiterated.

AVH Hub
Taxonomy is/should not be a problem because the source is APNI/APC. There may be a problem with ALA calculating regions from the geographical coordinates, especially if they aren’t taking the accuracy of the coordinate into consideration.

Who is the AVH audience – is it us or is it the public? If the AVH is seen as something for the public, perhaps the common names should be removed? Should common names be included, even if they are sourced from APNI/APC? There was vague agreement that common names would not be included.

Should the map tab be the default tab? The speed of the map tab is slower than that of the records tab. The question was raised as to whether an indvidual user’s preference for map versus record could be stored. A vague decision in the direction of the map page being the default was agreed.

Action: CHAH members should review the AVH hub demo site and use the “AVH Feedback” tab to provide comments and feedback: http://avh-demo.ala.org.au.

CHAH thanks the ALA for their tremendous work to date on the AVH hub, and also for the ALA DELTA.

Is the AVH hub a problem for NZVH? There is not enough information currently available, but a meeting in NZ next week should help decide what happens to NZVH. A commitment of resources to fund a migration to the AVH hub design would be the biggest hurdle.

AVH MoU
CHAH discusssed whether the MoU approach is the best one to use. It was agreed that it is important politically to have one, but it’s important to word it in a way that is flexible in terms of what fields need to be delivered to AVH.

Action: CHAH to come up with some wording on a revised MoU and circulate the draft.

AVH - Where to now?

 * Name services and state censuses: carried over until next CHAH teleconference
 * Online floras: it was agreed that a discussion of online floras can wait until after the AVH hub is up and running

AVH data mobilisation and aggregation
This paper was modified during the HISCOM meeting. The modified paper has been posted on the HISCOM wiki (AVH aggregation and mobilisation).

In the current model, Niels aggregates the data. In the revised model, AVH/ALA aggregates the data into the ALA biocache directly from each herbarium. The current model is to continue until the revised model can be implemented.

CHAH endorses all the recommendations in the data mobilisation and aggregation paper and moves to implement them immediately.

Digitising paper
CHAH feels they need to have a discussion about what our images are for. For example, are they archival, or something less? CHAH requested that Bryan email his presentation and associated longer document to Stacey Rosenbrock for posting to CHAH-L and HISCOM-L.