[tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?

[Mark WIlden]

Why is it necessary for tdwg to address this? Taxonomy is hardly the only field that cares about place names. How has this problem been solved by everyone else? Where is this information already stored and what is its API?



On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" <N.Bailly at cgiar.org> wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
> 
> I think that one long-term option is that GBIF/TDWG extend the work of the geographic and ISO standards for assembling a global database with as many administrative divisions in as many countries as possible, including past divisions, and provide a service to match the couples (administrative division name, category), not only the name, in this database that will hold the hierarchy; and a service to query through this hierarchy (e.g., if I query France/Basse-Normandie, I select all the divisions under Basse-Normandie).
> 
> In the collection databases, we would only need to input the name of the lowest known division and the label of the administrative division, which should be enough with the country to get what we want through these services.
> 
> Example:
> Locality: Riva-Bella beach 
> Country: France
> Administrative division category: Commune
> Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
> 
> In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here):
> Country: France
> Administrative division category: Commune
> Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
> Country: France
> Administrative division category: Département
> Administrative division name: Calvados
> Country: France
> Administrative division category: Région
> Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
> 
> The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
> 
> No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical.
> And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
> 
> 
> Seems to be huge, but is it so?
> Not to compile the global database I presume, at least down to municipality level (in Philippines, we have city subdivisions, the Barangays) because I assume that in many countries such data are available. And here there is no discussion possible because the divisions are decided outside our community. Moereover, they are useful for all countries because of administrative reporting systems, even if we consider that species have no administrative limits.
> 
> Now the question is how to update the current collection databases. Yes but there is such a need to clean up the data there that it can only help the process.
> There will be issues with homonyms, old names, spelling variant, etc, so wht? All those can be kept in verbatim, and be standardized later, because in te form they are, they are usually not useful if they are not scrutinized manually. So the work needs to be done whatsoever.
> 
> A big project. More along Gregor's view I suppose, the global database being replace by the semantic processes, as long as the divisions data are made available in ontology format by countries.
> 
> Nicolas. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller
> Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM
> To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund
> Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
> 
> Aren't these terms in Darwin Core primarily applicable to specimen (and I suppose also observation) records?  And don't specimen labels sometimes include these geopolitical subdivisions?  And aren't those geopolitical subdivisions included on the labels sometimes not modern, and therefore sometimes not in a unifying modern gazetteer?  Having the DwC terms available for use, enables the location-related information included on a specimen label to be recorded and exchanged.  
> 
> I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?  
> 
> I tend to agree that the problem in DwC is with the use of some particular examples of geopolitical subdivisions - stateProvince, county, municipality - rather than something generic like 1st, 2nd, 3rd Subdivision as Markus is suggesting.
> 
> Chuck 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn
> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM
> To: Markus Englund
> Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
> 
> I think the neutral names are of limited value. They require everyone to understand the intended meaning and it is highly error prone that different collection manager will read the specifications differently.
> In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district,
> "Regierungsbezirk") hardly anyone outside of the administration would know which one the own town belongs to. Then we have the "Kreis" which is roughly equivalent to a county and fairly well recognized by most people. This has the slight catch that small cities belong to a county, whereas big cities are "county-free cities" (kreisfreie Stadt). As a result, one manager would map "Regierungsbezirk" to second level, others the "Kreis", others will put the "circuit-free city" in second level, others will leave it empty and put the county-free city in third, to have all cities in the same field...
> 
> One of the big advantages of computers is, in my eyes, that they can easily handle (at least) simple synonymy. With the advent of the Semantic Web this promise has become even more realistic.
> 
> Providing a set of semantically well defined and well labeled names, some of which are applicable only to some countries, and leave it to software and a configuration thereof to figure out which mapping is most appropriate for which use case, would be my preference over the mapping pre-defined and just numbered by level in the hierarchy.
> 
> Gregor
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