Create Collection Relationships via the WorkBench

[Grant]

Uploading Collection Relationships in WorkBench

Collection relationships in Specify allow the association of specimens with other specimens in different collections. Examples include tissue-voucher, plant-pollinator, and host-parasite relationships. This functionality enables you to document these important connections, even across different disciplines, as long as the collections use the same catalog number format.

In Specify, one collection serves as the ‘Source’ and the other as the ‘Destination’. A source can have multiple destinations, but each destination can only have one source. For instance, if a bee pollinates several flowers, the bee collection is the source, and the flowers are the destinations.

Using the WorkBench, you can upload one or more Collection Relationship (CR) links for objects in your collection.

Before proceeding, ensure you have configured Collection Relationships within your collection.

If you’re new to the WorkBench, please review the WorkBench documentation.

Steps to Upload Collection Relationships

1. Access the WorkBench
   Click on the WorkBench item in the navigation menu. Then, select Create New to initiate a new data set.

2. Select Base Table
   Choose Collection Relationship as the base table for your upload. You can also upload CR relationships with Collection Object as the base table, provided the CR is within the current collection. This is particularly useful when the Collection Objects (COs) already exist and you need to link them.

   

3. Mapping and Data Set Example
   Follow the prompts and begin to map your data correctly. The mapping can be as simple as a catalog number from the source collection and a catalog number from the destination collection, but you can use the full power of the WorkBench for mapping & configuration.
   You can refer to the examples below for guidance:

   
   
   
   

   Creating Multiple Links
   You can even create multiple links from a source CO to a list of destination COs.

   
   

[willem]

This is a great development, thank you! This is just what I need. It would be great to be able to validate the match between left and right sides, but I guess this could be done before importing the data (e.g. just using excel).

The concern is that the wrong catalogue number has been typed, and one would need to compare one or more fields on both sides of the collectionrelationship to be sure that the catalogue number is correct. Perhaps this just needs to become part of the broader workflow, where you would find a way to join data exported from the left side with data manually captured for importing into the right side. Only after validating would you then import the validated right-side data.

It may be an idea to think about ways to incorporate the validation step in the workbench application.