From ICISWiki

GRIMS main > GRIMS Issues and Solutions

---

Collecting Mission

Overview

There are several reasons for conducting collecting mission which is usually one of the following [1]:

• Rescue collecting
• Immediate use
• Gap filling
• Research purpose
• Opportunistic reasons

Collecting missions are usually funded because this can be very costly and should be conducted scientifically. The Oracle IRGCIS stores the collecting mission information. But IRGCIS record shows around 126 collecting missions that have missng and/or no funding agency (7726 accessions). There are 27124 accessions that have funding agency but do not belong to a collecting mission.

With the recod presented above, how do we plan to mave forward with the collecting mission?

Answer

--Rhamilton 17:28, 19 May 2006 (PHT)

Only the mission-code should be in the germplasm attributes. It should point to a table indexed by mission-code and containing the following info:

Field	Contents	Source in IRGCIS
Mission_Code	Arbitrary mission ID, Indexed no duplicates	PASSPORT1; or, if missing from PASSPORT1, newly assigned. Use negative numbers for newly assigned mission codes, to indicate that they are "virtual" missions - we don't actually know if one virtual mission corresponds to one actual mission, and we need it just to store mission-related data
Mission_Country	Country where mission was conducted	IRGC_MISSION:ISO
Mission_Start	Start date of mission	PASSPORT1 or IRGC_MISSION
Mission_End	End date of mission	PASSPORT1 or IRGC_MISSION
Fund	Funding source; if missing in PASSPORT1, it’s missing here.	PASSPORT1:FUND

Then, to allow multiple collectors and collecting institutes per collecting mission, we need a second additional table, containing (1) Mission_Code indexed with duplicates allowed, and (2) codes pointing to records in the ICIS tables for peoples / institutes. The info needed from IRGCIS is Last name, First name, Institute code, Institute acronym, Institute name, Institute location (address and Country)

Notes:

• for several of the above fields (Mission_Start, Mission_End, collectors names, collecting institutes, mission_country), there are several sources of the same data in IRGCIS, but unfortunately the different sources are not consistent. Therefore it will be necessary to correct the IRGCIS data before populating these tables. For example for Mission_Start and Mission_End, sometimes PASSPORT1 contains more accurate info, and sometimes IRGC_MISSION contains more accurate info: take the values from whichever table contains the better info.
• Mission_Country duplicates germplasm attribute ORI_COUNTRY, but we need it in both places – it needs to be a germplasm attribute because not all accessions have a mission_code, and it needs to be here to enable validation of ORI_COUNTRY for accessions with a mission_code – i.e. to check that all accessions with a common mission_code have the same ORI_COUNTRY
• Many accessions have no mission_code but do have data on at least one of the other fields in the above tables. We will need to create new mission_codes, by grouping accessions into distinct combinations of values, and assign a new mission_code to each table