Adding permits information to EML

[kmexter]

Sampling and collecting permits are necessary in field biology. It is also now necessary to provide information about your permits along with your data, and this to be in the metadata (not just as attached data files).
Since there is much information that would need to be provided

• permit name
• permit holder
• permit giver
• date and geographical range
• purpose and extent of permit
  it would be nice to have a class to hold these information, e.g. as there is a protocols one.

[mbjones]

Great proposal, @kmexter. I hope others weigh in here if they also think this would be useful, and might indicate what information they would want to see in such a structure. A couple of questions:

• where would this be located in EML? Is the permit a property of project, or of dataset? Or elsewhere?
• is there any need for controlled terms in the fields like for permit giver? I assume we could reuse eml:ResponsiblePartyType for that
• Is there a need for a separate permit number or identifier field?

I think the way to move forward with this would be to 1) discuss what the structure for this field would be in this ticket, and, once we have rough agreement, 2) someone volunteers to create a Pull Request with that proposed new structure that we can all examine and test. Once we were happy with it, it would go out in the next EML release.

Would love to get general feedback on this feature request from the EML community.

[kmexter]

:-D

• where would this be located in EML? Is the permit a property of project, or of dataset? Or elsewhere? --> it is a property of the dataset, I would say: scientist ask for permit -> scientist collects wet floppy stuff from the sea -> turns said wet floppy into DNA -> puts DNA and DNA-derived results in a catalogue and makes a metadata record for them. To my mind this links the permit to the data(set).
• is there any need for controlled terms in the fields like for permit giver? I assume we could reuse eml:ResponsiblePartyType for that. --> Yes, we could reuse many field. We've been drawing up a possible structure for a permits class, and have tried to re-use as much as possible. I can provide a UML diagram (once I convert my hand-drawn flowchart into UML) if you think that is useful?
• Is there a need for a separate permit number or identifier field? --> yes, because there could potentially be more than one permit for a dataset. Actually, to make it more complicated, different chunks of data within the datafile that the metadata record is for could have their own permits, resulting in dozens of permits (even more!) per metadata record. It is for this reason that the permits need to have coverage information included. (I am particularly concerned with the Nagoya Protocol-related permits here)