standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

deposits and crusts. The aim was to put it on the Authority’s Web site and
make it available to everybody – business, public, the scientific community
and policy makers – just as Rex had suggested for the proposed
environmental database.
Within house, he added, the Authority had resources for specialists,
such as a marine biologist on staff, as well as information technology
people including programmers. One of its primary interests was to be able
to utilize the data and information already gathered, and make it available
to the public. Data submitted by contractors that met the requirements
identified by the Workshop would be rather useless sitting in files. If
additional specialists were needed to assist in developing the database, the
Finance Committee would be approached about the requirements.
Specimen collections
A participant urged the Workshop to recommend that, when voucher
collections were transferred to a museum, the museum should archive
them as voucher collections. Otherwise, if the museum received no
instructions, it would break the collection up taxonomically, because
museums were taxonomic institutions. This was not a terrible problem,
because a properly run museum, given the right code, should be able to lay
its hands on any specimen in ten minutes. However, complications would
arise if a researcher was looking for 50 species. The Natural History
Museum, London, had developed a special archive system for commercial
voucher collections, so that, for example, someone wanting to look at the
polychaete collection could get a box archived as the CCFZ polychaetes.
Commenting on the importance of this approach to users of
museums, Rex said that, with a catalogued collection built up over centuries
and accessible from the catalogue or by computer, a user would have to be
familiar with large parts of the collection in order to know what to look for
and how to look for it. This was particularly true for deep-sea materials
because biodiversity would be documented not by publishing the
classification of every group that came in but, initially at least, by having
competent people sort specimens into species, tabulate the number of
individuals and ensure that they were properly archived in the museum.
Obviously, researchers would not want to wait for the complete taxonomy to
be done on all those groups before analyzing them.
Asked about the possibility of linking the computerized database to
physical objects such as manganese nodules or nematodes, Rex reiterated
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