University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![VN Short
Logo](http://lh4.ggpht.com/-CH8bqcF-Whg/UuJKkNRlovI/AAAAAAAADP8/dAyO9A7yUzo/VN_Short_Logo.png?imgmax=800 "VN_Short_Logo.png"){border="0"
width="180" height="187" style="float:right;"}VertNet has announced that
they have implemented [issue tracking using
GitHub](http://blog.vertnet.org/post/74297660841/issue-tracking-available-in-the-vertnet-portal-at).
This is a really interesting development, as figuring out how to capture
and make use of annotations in biodiversity databases is a problem
that\'s attracting a lot of attention. VertNet have decided to use
[GitHub](http://github.com) to handle annotations, but in a way that
hides most of GitHub from users (developers tend to love things like
GitHub, regular folks, not so much, see [The Two Cultures of
Computing](http://pgbovine.net/two-cultures-of-computing.htm)).  
  
The [VertNet
blog](http://blog.vertnet.org/post/74297660841/issue-tracking-available-in-the-vertnet-portal-at)
has a detailed walk through of how it works. I\'ve made some comments on
that blog, but I\'ll repeat them here.  
  
At the moment the VertBet interface doesn\'t show any evidence of issue
tracking (there\'s a link to add an issue, but you can\'t see if there
are any issues). For example, visiting an example [CUMV Amphibian
1766](http://portal.vertnet.org/o/cornell-university-museum-of-vertebrates/cumv-amphibian-collection?id=b056a508-34c5-46ca-9414-1b2e8696409b)
I don\'t see any evidence on that page that there is an issue for this
record (there is an issue, see
<https://github.com/cumv-vertnet/cumv-amph/issues/1>). It think it\'s
important that people see evidence of interaction (that way you might
encourage others to participate). This would also enable people to gauge
how active collection managers are in resolving issues (\"gee, they
fixed this problem in a couple of days, cool\").  
  
Likewise, it would be nice to have a collection-level summary in the
portal. For example, looking at [CUMV Amphibian
1766](http://portal.vertnet.org/o/cornell-university-museum-of-vertebrates/cumv-amphibian-collection?id=b056a508-34c5-46ca-9414-1b2e8696409b)
I\'m not able to click through to a page for CUMV Amphibians (why can\'t
I do this at the moment - there needs to be a way for me to get to the
collection from a record) to see how many issues there are for the whole
collection, and how fast they are being closed.  
  
I think the approach VertNet are using has a lot of potential, although
it sidesteps some of the most compelling features of GitHub, namely
forking and merging code and other documents. I can\'t, for example,
take a record, edit it, and have those edits merged into the data. It\'s
still a fairly passive \"hey, there\'s a problem here\", which means
that the burden is still on curators to fix the issue. This raises the
whole question of what to do with user-supplied edits. There\'s a nice
paper regarding validating user input into Freebase that is relevant
here, see \"Trust, but Verify: Predicting Contribution Quality for
Knowledge Base Construction and Curation\"
(<http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556195.2556227> \[not live yet\], [PDF
here](http://www.ipeirotis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/wsdm2014-cqual.pdf)).


VertNet has announced that they have implemented issue tracking using GitHub. This is a really interesting development, as figuring out how to capture and make use of annotations in biodiversity databases is a problem that's attracting a lot of attention.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

VertNet starts issue tracking using GitHub