[tdwg-content] data provenance; was Re: Updated TDWG BioBlitz RDF Example with Pivot View and Data Browsing

Bob Morris morris.bob at gmail.com
Sat Feb 26 20:01:11 CET 2011


Your arguably reasonable recoding of the geo uri's of your example
illustrates an issue on which so much metadata is silent: provenance. Once
exposed, it is probably impossible for someone to know how the uncertainty
(or any other data that might be the subject of opinion or estimate) was
determined and whether the data is fit for some particular purpose, e.g.
that the species were observed near each other.

BTW, the IETF geo proposal was adopted in 2010, in the final form given at
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870 . One interesting point is
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870#section-3.4.3 which says
  "Note: The number of digits of the values in <coordinates> MUST NOT
beinterpreted as an indication to the level of uncertainty." The
section
following is also interesting, albeit irrelevant for your procedure. It
implies that when uncertainty is omitted (and therefore unknown), then
"geo:41.53000000,-70.67000000"
 and "geo:41.53,-70.67"  identify  the same geo resource.


Bob Morris

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> [...]
>
> 5) I added in my proposed "area" so that it is easy to see what species
> were observed near each other. Since there was no measure of radius in these
> longitude and latitudes I made the radius 100 meters.
>     Normally I would estimate the radius for a GPS reading to be within 10
> meters but some of these observations were made where the GPS reading was
> taken and the readings were given only to two decimals.
>
> Area = long, lat; radius in meters following the ietf proposal but with the
> precision of the long and lat standardized
> example "geo:41.53000000,-70.67000000;u=100"
>
> [...]
>
-- 
Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob at gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
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