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Use Case 13

Use Case 13: Acquire New Concept from Expert

Actors

Primary Actor
a taxonomist or any individual with "permission" to newly create taxonomic concepts that will for some time only exist in the SEEK Taxon database. These concepts can have formal or informal names ("Cary ovata var. australis", "Shagbark Hickory, var. 1"), combined with the reference citation "sec. author 1, SEEK Taxon database (year, version, etc.)".

Description

This Use Case concerns the (possibly rare) situation where an "expert" (ecologist or taxonomist) intends to enter a concept into the SEEK Taxon database that apparently existed nowhere else, or only in informal, difficult-to-access documents, such as an individual researcher's documents or files.

Flow of Events

Pre-conditions

  • See other Use Cases in which taxonomic concepts are transferred into the SEEK Taxon database; typically the author and contributor will be identical in this case.

Basic Flow

  1. The Primary Actor "organizes" the transfer interaction with SEEK. It is in the interest of the concept author to "annotate" the new concept as fully as possible, and to have this information stored for the long term.
  2. Once the Primary Actor has passed the organizational steps, an interface is available to initiate the actual, manual transfer process. The concept author may choose to use queries to confirm the spellings of names, etc. Otherwise the process is similar to manual transfer of existing concepts, although here the reference is "SEEK Taxon database".
  3. Having entered the core concept information, the author is now asked to add (new) manual connections to existing synonymous and parent/child concepts, which may either already be stored in the SEEK Taxon database, or be a part of the set of new concepts currently transferred.

Examples

  1. An ecologist is submitting a data set to SEEK and realizes during the process of matching the data set names to concepts that the SEEK Taxon database has no entry (sufficiently) matching her concept of "Carolina Hickory", used in her notes throughout the study. She thus creates such a concept, authored by her, with the reference "SEEK Taxon database".
  2. A taxonomist is submitting new concepts for a set of insect "morpho-species" (informally named, yet presumably distinct) to the SEEK Taxon database, so that ecologists studying these species can link their results to concepts (rather than names).

Post-conditions

Later "identifications" (...) of the new concepts to formally published, Code-abiding ones are desirable.

Alternative Flows

  • See Use Case on new expert connections of concepts.

Further Details

Storage of information about specimens (vouchers) is desirable; that way the meaning of the concept can be checked by experts other than the concept author.

Non-functional Requirements

None (in particular).

Issues

See Use Case on new expert connections of concepts.

History

28 March 2004
(NMF) Use Case created from previous Word document.



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This page last changed on 30-Jun-2004 13:58:22 PDT by LTER.stekell.