1

Re: Confidentiality

I would really like to see improvements in the handling of confidential data. At present it is only possible to mark an individual occurrance as confidential. This seems inadequate.

For example, various of the ornithology groups have requested that all data on a list of taxa be excluded form the NBN. It would be really useful to be able to mark Stone Curlew as a confidential species, with all new records added being automatically marked as confidential. I realise that there are a number of ways of working round this, but work-rounds have a way of being bypassed in my experience.

A second example, as Wildlife Sites Officer, I occasionally meet landowners who are preapred to allow access to their land only onthe condition that the data collected is not passed on to any third party. You might argue that such data is useless, but it is not, if we are able to use in anonymously in our analyses, we would also be able to tell data search clents that there is a record of a legally protected species within their search area. So it would be nice to be able to have confidential sites (where the existence of the site is not confidential, but all records are.)

A third circumstance we might come across a recorder who wishes all their records to be confidential.

Any chance of any/all of these in a future release?

Rob Large
Wildlife Sites Officer
Wiltshire & Swindon Biological Records Centre

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Re: Confidentiality

Thanks Rob, I will log these. Funds are extremely tight this year so we are concentrating on bug fixing unless further funds can be sourced for specific developments.

Best Wishes,
Lynn

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Re: Confidentiality

Hi Rob,

One idea migth be a batch update file which takes a taxon/person/site as an input, and marks all the associated data as confidential. It's not perfect as you would need to run it regularly, but it might be a good interim measure.

Regards

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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Re: Confidentiality

Thanks John,

that's more or less what I was intending to do. I haven't really looked into batch updates yet. Is there any useful documentation I should read?

Rob Large
Wildlife Sites Officer
Wiltshire & Swindon Biological Records Centre

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Re: Confidentiality

Hi Rob

Writing Batch Updates is very similar to writing XML Reports, so if you get to grips with that first, then you should be able to spot the differences by checking the files provided with Recorder. Unfortunately I am not aware of Batch Update specific tutorials, but there is XML Report documentation on the wiki at http://forums.nbn.org.uk/wiki/index.php … g_Tutorial as well as for download from Mike Weideli's site (http://www.lfield.co.uk/page7a.html). Also check the Recorder 6.14 help files.

Good luck,

John

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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Re: Confidentiality

Thanks John

Rob Large
Wildlife Sites Officer
Wiltshire & Swindon Biological Records Centre