Deep-root database: Kew Garden's 8 million specimen collection to find new life through data management Charles Darwin's legacy lives not just in the idea of evolution by natural selection, but also in the samples he collected. London's Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew house some 191 samples gathered by Darwin, including an Adiantum henslovianum fern collected from the Galápagos in 1835. It is among 8 million specimens, some of …
Boris and chums may hear and flog it off for a few pieces of silver
Thats a trick Boris and his predecessors learnt from Maggie: remember her "who needs industry - we're a SERVICE economy now" pronouncements? She forgot that a service economy needs punters to sell said services to, hence the current similarity of the UK economy and government to the B-Arc and its captain.
It seems to me that we'd be in a far better place if we had a bit more industry around and fewer financial leeches in their service industry. Apart from anything else people actually making and exporting stuff would be generating income to spend on services such as pubs, restaurants and entertainment rather than the current pyramid of service industry workers relying on being supported by other service industry workers.
Does nobody else see the odd resemblance of this to the medieval vision of crowds of angels dancing on the head of an unsupported pin?.
The problem with this approach seems to be the presumption that there exists something in the world that does what you need. This often seems to lead to evaluating various promises from an assortment of contracted custom development solution providers with an eye towards selecting the least bad amongst them.
A lesson from long ago: if you find something that does most of what you need and a feature is that you can customize to make it do the rest, you will regret your acquisition as the customizations will create no end of difficulty when you eventually reach a point where you have no choice but to upgrade. See, that "most of what you need," that was the easy part. The difficult part, the part that you can't live without, that's the part that is unique to your organization. You can't buy that part.
Hear fucking hear. The super-hardcore scientists on this are unlikely to be any great shakes with databases or IT in general (I'm basing this on specialists I've worked with and second- and third-hand tales of woe), which is evident by the fact that they're asking for help.
But marry them with a team of data and IT specialists who have even a passing interest in botany/horticulture, and you're onto a winner. You hopefully get a quality system and two-way learning between the teams.
I'd jump at the chance, and I'd be surprised if an in-house team ran up a bill anywhere near £35m. I could keep tabs on the tender process and see who gets it, and then apply for a job with the winning company, but the chances are all I'd be able to do is attempt mild damage control as I watched the thing overrun on both time and budget and possibly somehow result in the gardens burning down.
The most terrifying thing that could happen with this one, given that they've currently got some stuff in ASE, would be if SAP got their bony fingers on it. If that happens we may as well wave goodbye to plant life on Earth.
"I'd be surprised if an in-house team ran up a bill anywhere near £35m"
The £35m includes the cost of cataloguing the 8m specimens as well as implementing the system, at which point it starts looking reasonable (if each specimen costs £4 in staff time to catalogue - it's not much of a push to imagine a record might take 15 minutes to create if there's a lot of metadata to be entered - that's £32m right there).
Absolutely.
And it doesn't need a particularly large team. There's a lot of data, but it's relatively straightforward. The big job is creating the meta data and catalogue records for the 90% that doesn't have a digital record, and that's basically grunt-work. Having said that I did work on a project to digitise 900,000 typed catalogue records, created over a century or so, which needed some considerable IT cunning, and manual cleaning up, to go from OCR text to database. I think we found over 30 different date formats!
I'd also suggest that they consider splitting it into two parts. Firstly get a digital catalogue of everything, then move on to actually digitising the objects as part 2. It would be interesting to know how much of the budget is allowed for each chunk - design and build DB and system, populate DB, do digitising.
To be honest, I suspect one good bod could build a system in months.
Yep. A system that strikes that balance of letting the users do what they need to do, and not letting them create absolute garbage/destroy things, is what they're gonna need long term anyway so may as well get that in place and ready for grunt work.
On the dates, I expect you've noticed as I have that the number of different date formats simultaneously in play in a system having ≥ 2 seems to inversely correlate with the chances of any one of them being ISO-8601.
"...we have not historically pushed development of data technologies sufficiently far up our corporate agenda,"
"We were pursuing digitisation as a top priority of our scientific future to maximise scientific impact of our institute,"
Management BS detector going off here. Given his background is purported to be science, I wonder if he's caught something? Maybe his ability to spout weasel words was what got him the job? "Corporate agenda" indeed. Counterpoint the surrealism of the scientific impact...
Eh, the kind of person that is actually willing to speak to the press will often spout such pap, either because they think it's clever or because they've been moulded that way.
We should probably thank our lucky stars that the word "synergy" didn't make an appearance, and that they haven't been told that AI is going to do it via $magic.
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