Catalogue of Life - catalogueoflife

Grade: The grade for the resource as automatically determined by the criteria violations.; 2
Description: A full description of the resource from the resource itself, if possible.; The Catalogue of Life is the most comprehensive and authoritative global index of species currently available. It consists of a single integrated species checklist and taxonomic hierarchy. The Catalogue holds essential information on the names, relationships and distributions of over 1.6 million species.
Last curated: (Optional) The ISO 8601 date of when the resource was last curated.; 2018-02-18
Location: URL for the resource.; http://catalogueoflife.org/
Source type: (Optional) How the resource relates to the data it contains. Current allowable entries are: "unknown", "repository", "source", "integrator", and "warehouse".; source
Curation status: Whether or not annotation is complete on this resource. Current allowable entries are: "complete", "incomplete", and "nonpublic".; complete
Field: The area of research for the resource.; biology
Type: The type of data the resource contains.; custom
Categories: (Optional) Tags to describe the resource and its data.; biodiversity
distribution
biogeography
taxonomy
ontology
Access: (Optional) Links to the resource's data.; api
download
License: The license that is used by the resource. We use SPDX where we can or: "inconsistent", "public domain", "unlicensed", "all rights reserved", or "custom".; custom
License type: The type of license that is being used. This will be to define compatible data pools in the future; we only use the grossest terms now. If it is not known "unknown" is used. Current possible values are: "unknown", "unlicensed", "copyleft", "permissive", "public domain", "copyright", "restrictive", or "private pool".; restrictive
License location: (Optional) The link to the resource license.; http://catalogueoflife.org/content/terms-use
Focused curation: (Optional) Setting this flag to true indicates that the licensing was combinatorially complicated enough (as is the case in some commercial licenses) that the curator chose to wear a single "hat" during the process. From the site text: "While we try to cover as much of the licensing possibilities of a data resource that we can, in a few cases we may choose a particular "hat" to wear while evaluating to prevent a combinatorial explosion, which may also reduce the clarity of our curations for the community. In these cases, we may take on the role of a (1) non-commercial (2) academic (3) group that is (4) based in the US and trying to (5) create an aggregating resource, noting that other entities may have different results in the license commentary."; false
Issues: (Optional) Structured issues with the license. For every issue discovered with a resource, there should be a corresponding item in the license-issues field that marks the /exact/ violation, along with any comments. This field can be used by resources as the first step to improvement, as well as clarify any surrounding circumstances. Any issues or thoughts about a resource that do not slot into one of the criteria violations can go into the license-commentary field.; Criteria A.2.2: The resource uses custom terms.
Criteria B.1: Use seems to hinge on some contact with Sp2000. For example: \"If you wish to use the Catalogue of Life content on a public portal or webpage you are required to notify the Species 2000 Secretariat, and to assist with a check that the correct credits are given.\" Check check assistance especially seems to violate B.1.
Criteria C.1: The data \"download\" is quite complicated and should not actually be considered a download (see commentary). The API as given would likely require a custom spider to obtain the data in bulk.
Criteria D.1.2: Distribution seems to be prohibited without negotiation; example on the main ToS: \"Commercial use of this compilation or any of the species datasets contained within...or dissemination on the Internet, requires written permission from Species 2000 and ITIS.\"
Criteria E.1.1: Non-commercial restrictions exist on the data from the ToS.
Commentary: (Optional) Further commentary on the license, possibly including the though process of the curations and things like locations of additional licenses.; • The offered API, while possibly spiderable given a starting point, does not seem to offer bulk downloads or similarly significant metadata calls. Spiderable, but non-trivial custom code may be required.
• While not a violation, the credit requirements may be difficult to meet in some cases: \"Credit must be given at the following three levels on all occasions that records are shown. The three levels credit the complete work, the contributing database of the record, and the expert who provides taxonomic scrutiny of the individual record.\"
• The custom licensing terms do not seem to make clear rights around derivation and modification.
• The download is actually a Linux virtual machine in a custom wrapper that tries to drive interaction with a browser on port 8080; this is rather onerous and I do not think this could be considered a \"download\" so much as an \"offline\" site clone or application.
• Embedded in the \"download\" is further elaboration on the license, which seem to contain terms about internal use as well: \"Use of this compilation or any of the databases contained within it by commercial organisations requires a written agreement from Species 2000 and ITIS. This applies when it is used commercially for external services, products or publications and when it is used to provide internal services within an organisation.\"
Controversial: (Optional) Marker noting that there was some extended internal discussion or controversy about the evaluation of the licensing terms. If this is marked at "true", the controversy, or a link to a permanent archive of the controversy, must be sufficiently contained in the "license-commentary" to reconstruct the issues.; false
Contacts: (Optional) Resource contact information, link, email, or whatever is public.; sp2000@sp2000.org
Grants: (Optional) Semi-structured list of supporting grants.; TBD