Use Case 2

Use Case 2: Acquire Concept From Another Database Location (Automated)

Actors

Primary Actor: in the majority of cases, an "expert entity" (individual or community of taxonomists, institutions, organizations, "compilers", etc.) that have digitally archived (databased) taxonomic concept information, and intend to make this information available to the SEEK Taxon database.

This is the most important way that the SEEK Taxon database will be populated with taxonomic concepts coming from a range of providers. A "transfer schema" is being designed specifically for this purpose.

Flow of Events

Pre-conditions

None (apparently), other than a database structure that can manage the various independent transfers and updates through time.

Basic Flow

The Primary Actor "organizes" the transfer interaction with SEEK. Issues about property rights, proper crediting of the provider, versioning (possibly future peer review), taxonomic scope, quantity and quality of the concept information, etc., are clarified at this stage.
SEEK may announce this contribution and summarize its properties in a separate log.
One or more appropriate transfer schemas are available for the largely automated transfer process (see Further Details).

Examples

Roughly, the SEEK Taxon database acquires all taxonomic concepts present in the latest version of the USDA Plant database.

Post-conditions

Other users can view, query and (pending proper registry) reconnect the acquired taxonomic concepts. They may also assign their preferred statuses to them, or "edit" them in such a way that the orginal concepts are still credited to their provider.

Alternative Flows

The manual transfer of taxonomic concepts into the SEEK Taxon database will in essence use the same transfer schemas, made accessible through a public "expert user" interface.

Further Details

In all likelyhood, a single transfer schema (see TaxonWGConferenceCall_30_July_2003) will not suffice. Synonymy relations, parent/child relations, and statuses may each have separate transfer schemas (they have their own authors, etc.), since they can sit on top of the core taxonomic concept information.

Non-functional Requirements

Other database locations with well-circumscribed taxonomic concepts.

Issues

For other SEEK Taxon Use Cases, an algorithm is necessary to infer connections among concepts probabilistically. This algorithm may also come into play to avoid situations where newly transferred low-level taxonomic concepts (e.g. species and genera of nematode worms) is entirely unconnected to higher-level information (e.g. the Order Nematoda) already present in the SEEK Taxon database. Otherwise, in user queries of the high-level taxon, the low-level concepts might never be displayed.

History

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

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This page last changed on 30-Jun-2004 12:47:19 PDT by LTER.stekell.