Earlier this year, the NBN Trust awarded six contracts to develop verification rules for NBN Record Cleaner, the automated validation and verification decision-support tool for recorders and biodiversity data managers. Record Cleaner is designed to improve the efficiency of data flow and to ensure the quality of datasets on the NBN Gateway, by enabling the automated checking of large datasets in a variety of formats against validation and verification ‘rule sets’. Verification rule sets flag up any records of species that fall outside the known temporal or spatial distribution of that species, as well as highlighting records of species that are inherently difficult to identify.
Verification rule sets have already been developed for birds, vascular plants, butterflies, macro moths, hoverflies and some marine species. The new contracts have enabled verification rule sets to be produced for the following groups:
• Terrestrial and marine mammals – The Mammal Society in association with Cardiff University, ORCA (Organisation Cetecea) and The Bat Conservation Trust
• Bryophytes – British Bryological Society
• Spiders – Spider Recording Scheme of the British Arachnological Society
• Lichens and lichenicolous fungi – British Lichen Society
• Dragonflies and damselflies – Dragonfly Recording Network of the British Dragonfly Society
• True crabs – the Marine Biological Association
These rules will be incorporated into Record Cleaner from mid-May. Record Cleaner automatically searches for new rules every time it is opened, so it will alert users as soon as the new rules are available.
To maximise the usefulness of Record Cleaner within online data entry portals and by managers of multi-taxa datasets, rule sets now need to be developed for other taxonomic groups. Tenders are therefore invited from individuals or organisations able to produce verification rules for the taxonomic group in which they have expertise. Technical support for producing the rule sets in the correct format (.txt files) can be provided by the Biological Records Centre for terrestrial taxa, and by the Marine Biological Association for marine taxa.
Deadline
The deadline for applications is the 31st May 2012, contracts will be awarded by the 29th June 2012 and contract outputs must be complete by the 31st March 2013. Please click here to download the invitation to tender.
Follow this link to download the Record Cleaner tool and user guide, to view a demonstration video on Record Cleaner and to download reports produced by the organisations who developed the verification rule sets.
This work is funded under the Defra contract for development of the NBN.