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

John Wieczorek tuco at berkeley.edu
Wed Sep 5 22:34:51 CEST 2012


An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the
Global Administrative Areas (GADM;  http://www.gadm.org/) dataset, produced
in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) <
N.Bailly at cgiar.org> wrote:

> Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the
> complete administrative division hierarchy issue?
> UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not
> look for it.
> Nicolas.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:
> tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden
> Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM
> To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)
> Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and
> municipality?
>
> 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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