Projects, Products, Contacts

Relationships among Projects, Products, and Contacts

Projects, products, and contacts all share a relationship in mdEditor and are each entered independently.

Projects

A project encompasses a discrete effort on a particular topic with defined goals or objectives. The target projects for the SA Science Catalog are science projects whose topics and resulting products have value to partners or the public being able to discover and access them. Many projects are the result of SA issued financial assistance agreements, contracts, or inter-agency agreements. However, not everything funded through one of these mechanisms needs to be in the Science Catalog. For example, a contract to maintain an individual website likely does not quality as a “science project” nor does it provide public-relevant information. A grant to develop an interactive landscape-conservation tool, however, would be a science project that results in public-relevant information.

SA projects can also include other defined efforts that did not necessarily require the awarding of funds (i.e. internal efforts).

Individual data managers may want to track other projects using the same metadata format and store that information on ScienceBase, without publishing it to the SA Science Catalog.

Products

A product is a resource, usually (but not necessarily) developed as an output from a project. Products can be tools, data, maps, reports, presentations, workshops, etc. These will usually be the direct result of a project though there may be some products without a parent project.

Not every output of a project is necessarily a product, however. For example, meeting minutes do not have standalone value as a publicly-available resource. It is up to each data manager to determine which outputs should be entered as products.

Contacts

Contacts are the individuals and organizations involved with projects and products (e.g., investigators, collaborators, funders). Contacts are entered once in mdEditor and can be added to multiple projects and products.

Consult the Contacts section for information on adding contacts.

Relationships

Projects and Products will always have a relationship with contacts. Projects will always have at least one point of contact (FWS SA National Data Steward). Additional contact relationships may include project authors, metadata creators, funders, principal investigators, publishers, distributors, and many others. One crucial contact relationship between contacts, projects, and products is the role of the individual(s) and/or organization(s) who provided funding. This may include a direct full contributor or any partners that provided funding.

Contact types are specified in the contact record (examples: federal, state, NGO). Specific roles for each contact are defined within the respective project and product records (examples: principal investigator, collaborator).

Products are often the results of projects. mdEditor defines the relationships between projects and products through the Associated feature.

Consult either the Associating Records: Product or Associating Records: Project section for more information.