b. General/Yleistä

Last modified by Anniina Kuusijärvi on 2024/02/20 17:44

Page in Finnish: Yleistä

General features

Signing in

Kotka is used with a web browser at https://kotka.luomus.fi/. You can login using Haka or Virtu or laji.fi authentication or a Luomus username and a password (Luomus usernames and passwords are no longer renewed). Your username has to be activated before you use Kotka for the first time. Contact kotka(at)luomus.fi to do this.

If you e.g. need access to Kotka or you can't login for some reason, contact kotka(at)luomus.fi

If you are using Kotka from your work computer or laptop, you don't need to log off from Kotka (logging off from your Windows account is enough). If you use Kotka from a computer that is used by other people also (e.g. in a different museum), please log off when you are done. 

All data traffic between user and Kotka are encrypted.

A testing version is available at https://kotkatest.luomus.fi/ - you can use this to practice how to use Kotka. Data in the test version is not real data and can be edited freely. Contact kotka(at)luomus.fi to ask for the shared test credentials.

Users, groups and owners

All users belong to one or more groups or organisations in Kotka. (In Luomus, a group is basically same as a team.) A user can edit the data that is owned by one of the organisations they belong to. All logged-in users can:

  • add new data
  • see all data in Kotka (also data owned by other teams)
  • edit data owned by the organisation(s) they belong to
  • not edit data owned by others

All resources in Kotka have an owner organisation. This organisation defines which user has the rights to edit the information of each resource. Owner of record will be the organisation you belong to, but if you belong to several organisations, you need to choose the owner of record when entering data.

Example: The owner of record for a collection http://tun.fi/HR.87 is the Lichen herbarium of the Finnish Museum of Natural History. Only members of that team can edit the information for that collection.

Automatically saved data

Whenever data is saved to Kotka, some fields are filled in automatically. These include:

  • Who created the data (a specimen, for example) in the first place
  • Who was the last editor
  • When was the data created
  • When was the data edited the last time

In addition, all versions of the data is recorded in the database. All past changes and who did them can be reconstructed from this history data, so if someone accidentally erases something, it can be restored. So far users can view specimen history in Kotka web user interface, but digging into the history of other resources is possible only for admins.

Data 

Kotka handles several types of data (more information on the linked pages):

General principles

When using Kotka, remember these general guidelines:

1. Kotka contains primary data.

Once the information of a collection or a specimen is entered into Kotka, all updates to the data are done in Kotka and not in any other systems. Other systems fetch data from Kotka but Kotka does not fetch data from other systems (so far): Kotka has the final say on what information there is about a collection or a specimen.

Many museums have had their collection and specimen data in Excel files or own databases in the past. Kotka is not meant to be a copy of the old systems, it is meant to replace these. Data in tables and databases is transferred to Kotka once and after that the data is updated only in Kotka. It is not meaningful to keep up separate tables alongside Kotka. This just results in confusion of having several copies of the data without knowing which one is the one with the latest updates. 

In some rare cases there may be secondary data in Kotka, but it is always marked and should be considered if the data should be transferred to e.g. Data Bank, system made by FinBIF (see more info on secondary and primary data: https://laji.fi/en/about/3977 (in Finnish))

2. Kotka data is used by several people in different contexts.

Kotka is a shared system. Thus when entering data, remember that you are likely not the only user for it. Kotka is targeted for personnel in natural history museums and the expressions and formats used for data entry should be understandable for them. It is not wise to make entries or notes that only you know what they mean, as someone in another institution or in your institution years later may try to find information from those entries. The data in Kotka is also shared to FinBIF Species-portal laji.fi, where users all over the world can browse and search for the information with various criteria. Of course not all data in Kotka can be made understandable to the general public, but good to keep in mind.

3. Data entered should be machine readable.

In many cases, Kotka data is searched through a search engine based on search criteria. Unlike people, machines are poor at interpreting natural language. This is why the data needs to be entered into correct fields and many of the fields accept data only in a specified format.

Example: Locality names is a field for entering names of localities in their basic from. If you want to tell that the specimen is collected "200 meters from Kampintori to the north", use the Locality description field and write the place name "Kamppi" in Locality names. Otherwise the search by the word "Kamppi" does not find this record.

Example: Do not enter information to a wrong field just to get specimen labels to look the way you want them to look. Contact the admins instead.

4. Each resource entered to Kotka gets a unique Uniform Resource Identifier (HTTP-URI).

"A resource" is any information entity entered on a single form in Kotka. Resource types are for example collection, tag, specimen or organization. HTTP-URI, Uniform Resource Identifier, is a unique identifier that the resource gets and that is used to find the resource. The format of there URIs is http://domain/XX.YY

5. Information must not be lost when saving data to Kotka.

As a system Kotka should be able to accept all existing information about a collection or a specimen. If it seems that there is no place for a piece of information, the information must not be left out. Instead contact Kotka support at kotka(at)luomus.fi and ask for assistance.