iPhylo: Annotating GBIF, from datasets to nanopublications

"Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic. Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files. These are for the most part simply CSV tables (spreadsheets) with some associated administrivia (AKA metadata). GBIF consumes Darwin Core Archives, does some post-processing to clean things up a little, then indexes the contents on key fields such as catalogue number, taxon name, and geographic coordinates. What I'm proposing is that we make use of this infrastructure, in that any annotation is itself a Darwin Core Archive file that GBIF ingests. I envisage three typical use cases: A user downloads some GBIF data, cleans it for their purposes (e.g., by updating taxonomic names, adding some georeferencing, etc.) then uploads the edited data to GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive. This edited file gets a DOI (unless the user has go one already, say by storing the data in a digital archive like Zenodo). A user takes some GBIF data and enhances it by adding links to, for example, sequences in GenBank for which the GBIF occurrences are voucher specimens, or references which cite those occurrences. The enhanced data set is uploaded to GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive and, as above, gets a DOI. A user edits an individual GBIf record, say using an interface like this. The result is stored as a Darwin Core Archive with a single row (corresponding to the edit occurrence), and gets a DOI (this is a nanopublication, of which more later) ..."