title: The trouble with triplets in biodiversity informatics: a data-driven case against current identifier practices.
abstract: The biodiversity informatics community has discussed aspirations and approaches for assigning globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) to biocollections for nearly a decade. During that time, and despite misgivings, the de facto standard identifier has become the "Darwin Core Triplet", which is a concatenation of values for institution code, collection code, and catalog number associated with biocollections material. Our aim is not to rehash the challenging discussions regarding which GUID system in theory best supports the biodiversity informatics use case of discovering and linking digital data across the Internet, but how well we can link those data together at this moment, utilizing the current identifier schemes that have already been deployed. We gathered Darwin Core Triplets from a subset of VertNet records, along with vertebrate records from GenBank and the Barcode of Life Data System, in order to determine how Darwin Core Triplets are deployed "in the wild". We asked if those triplets follow the recommended structure and whether they provide an easy and unambiguous means to track from specimen records to genetic sequence records. We show that Darwin Core Triplets are often riddled with semantic and syntactic errors when deployed and curated in practice, despite specifications about how to construct them. Our results strongly suggest that Darwin Core Triplets that have not been carefully curated are not currently serving a useful role for relinking data. We briefly consider needed next steps to overcome current limitations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the CU Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Guralnick
authors.affiliation: CU Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Conlin
authors.affiliation: Berkeley Natural History Museums, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Deck
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
authors.forename: Brian J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Stucky
authors.affiliation: Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America.
authors.forename: Nico
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Cellinese
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet