Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: America del Nord (Theatre I)
Date: 2013-10-29 02:00 PM – 02:15 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-05
Abstract
Assessing the data quality is an important part of many biodiversity projects (or even research projects in general). Many of the tasks related to checking specific data elements or to correcting false elements are similar or even identical throughout many of those projects. So in order to avoid duplicate work the projects OpenUp (http://open-up.eu/), BioVeL (http://www.biovel.eu/) and reBiND (http://rebind.bgbm.org/) at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM) decided to join forces and form a Data Quality Initiative (DQI). The goal of this initiative is to coordinate the data quality issues of the participating projects and provide software tools for specific problems that can be used by all of them. This way the individual developers of these projects can focus on a few particular tools instead of having to cover all of the potential data quality problems, resulting in higher quality tools. The resulting software tools will also be made available under an open source license for other projects to use. Some of these tools might even be of use for researchers outside the biodiversity community, e.g. tools for checking and converting GPS coordinates or matching country names from various languages.
The initiative is open for other projects, developers or interested individuals to join in, making it possible to strengthen the joined forces and to address the issue of data quality on an even bigger scale.
In the talk I want to show how the DQI works and how the resulting software tools will be structured. I will list the tools we are currently working on as well as ideas for future ones. Also I will explain how other projects can join the DQI so we can provide even more and better data quality tools to the biodiversity community in the future.