[tdwg-content] dwc: city to county

[Gregor Hagedorn]

At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to
the dwc effort:

--------

1. While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc
terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists,
such as dc or xmp, see
http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary),
we note the conspicuous absence of

** city or place name **

The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the
future routinely used on digital images. dwc has

http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location
Has Domain:	
Definition:	A spatial region or named place.

and

Identifier:	http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality
Has Domain:	http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location
Definition:	The specific description of the place. Less specific
geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms
(higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county,
waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information
modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or
standardize the description.
Comment:	Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta
237)". For discussion see
http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location

However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information
that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be
circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.

In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name
for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in
gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?

--------

2. If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer
stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the
province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as
administration province of a state of the federal republic
(Regierungsbezirk).

--------

3. The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:

Term Name: county
Identifier:	http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county
Has Domain:	http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location
Definition:	The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political
region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which
the Location occurs.
Comment:	Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion
see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location

Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to
interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the
literal definition above would require to map county to
Regierungsbezirk.

Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions,
and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.

I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:

Definition:	 The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant
political region between cities or villages and states or provinces
(county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.


Gregor
-- 
---------------------------------
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn
Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2
12167 Berlin
skype: g.hagedorn

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