[Ala-portal] Terminology and their relationship

[Burke Chih-Jen Ko [GBIF]]

Hi Martin,
(I guess this question should be addressed to you, but others are very welcome to comment.)

I am clicking around the "metadata management" section and wondering about how these units, i.e. institution, data hub, data provider, collection and resource, are related to each other. I believe having a picture of the collection management model here would be helpful for those who want to adopt ALA portal for their data management workflow.

So far I can see:
1) Within data provider, one can create a data resource. The data provider and add collections or institutions as "record consumer";
2) Within data resource, one can add collections or institutions as "record consumer";

3) Within institution, one can create a collection and also go to data resource to add the institution itself as "record consumer";

4) Within collection, one can go to data resource to add the collection itself as "record consumer";

5) However, when creating a data hub, it's not clear how a data hub is associated with other units. Semantically it sounds like a super unit for data providers. But I am not sure and please correct me.

Here a graphic in omnigraffle and pdf format is attached:
OmniGraffle: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rhc3ha089mgxpih/Collectory%20relationship.graffle
PDF: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ul95nwojl3nxkkw/Collectory%20relationship.pdf

In the graph, only resource is drawn in solid line because I consider that's where the actual data resource and it links to the processing in the occurrence store (biocache).

Is the graph looked right to you? Having correct understanding of the model will be helpful for me to explain the what's happening among those technical components. Please feel free to tweak it.

Many thanks,

Burke