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Topic: Working group one - next steps

The following has recently gone out to the members of the quality control and verification group.

Dear NBN Verification Working Group Members and interested parties,

You can now view the notes from the meeting in February by clicking here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FNW … eXOA/edit#.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any problems accessing the document.

Martin, David and I have been discussing what we think the next steps for this group could be and have come up with the following suggestion:

ALERC, BRC and NBN will review existing verification terms with a view to these being adopted by NBN, and assess how these can be mapped onto sets of terms in use across other systems, and how they can be brought into use within the “Atlas of Living …” environment. Further consultation will then be needed to explore how the use of a standard set of terms can be more widely encouraged, and how to deal with verification taking place at multiple points within the recording community, so that options can be circulated for agreement among the group.

This should allow us to take a significant step towards our aim of having an agreed and transparent protocol for verification that can be used across the network.

Please feel free to get in touch with any thoughts, ideas or comments, or post them on the NBN forum.  I will request a dedicated area of the NBN forum to discuss verification as I don’t think there is one already.

Hopefully many of you will be at the NFBR conference later in the week, in which case I look forward to seeing you there.

As you can see, the NBN secretariat have kindly provided a dedicated board on the forum for this working group so please use it to post questions and comments on the work of the group, especially if you are a member of the group.

Any news or communications from me will be posted here, and I will suggest to BRC that they do the same.

Regards,

Tom Hunt - Association of Local Environmental Record Centres, National Coordinator

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Re: Working group one - next steps

It's great to see this working group tackling the key issues at the heart of species recording in the UK. When considering setting national data standards and agreeing data exchange formats, I would urge the group to consider international standards as far as practicable in order to alleviate similar technical issues further down the line when it comes to integrating with GBIF and the world. Decisions made now will have implications for many years to come, and I'm confident that the members of this group are the people to make these decisions. On behalf of the biological recording community, thank you!

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Re: Working group one - next steps

In respect of the above

consider international standards as far as practicable in order to alleviate similar technical issues further down the line when it comes to integrating with GBIF and the world

the following seems highly relevant:
http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=6563