Basis of Record

Basis of record is a Darwin Core term that refers to the specific nature of the record and can refer to one of 6 classes:

  • Living Specimen - a specimen that is alive, for example, a living plant in a botanical garden or a living animal in a zoo.

  • Preserved Specimen - a speciment that has been preserved, for example, a plant on an herbarium shett or a cataloged lot of fish in a jar.

  • Fossil Specimen - a preserved specimen that is a fossil, for example, a body fossil, a coprolite, a gastrolith, an ichnofossil or a piece of petrified tree.

  • Material Citation - A reference to, or citation of, one, a part of, or multiple specimens in scholarly publications, for example, a citation of a physical specimen from a scientifci collection in taxonomic treatment in a scientiufic publication or an occurrence mentioned in a field note book.

  • Human Observation - an output of human observation process eg. evidence of an occurrence taken from field notes or literature or a records of an occurence without physical evidence nor evidence captured with a machine.

  • Machine Observation - An output of a machine observation process for example a photograph, a video, an audio recording, a remote sensing image or an occurrence record based on telemetry.

Basis or record should allow users to filter out those indidivuals in ex-situ collections such as zoos and botanic gardens or fossils as well as filter for those records based on whether the record is based on a specimen or an observation, which can support taxonomic validation. You should note that, even though this can be a useful filter, data publishers do not always fill the basis of record field correctly, or, there may be nuances in the data that may not be immediately obvious to a user e.g. https://data-blog.gbif.org/post/living-specimen-to-preserved-specimen-understanding-basis-of-record/ and you should always double check your data before use.

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