[tdwg-content] Easting and northing

Roderic Page Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk
Mon Feb 9 11:57:14 CET 2015


Hi John,

So, if I understand you correctly, you would have hoped that TTU would have output something like this:

“dwc:verbatimCoordinates” : “18M 166624 9840350”

rather than put the easting and northing into verbatimLatitude and verbatimLongitude.

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email:  Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
Tel:  +44 141 330 4778
Skype:  rdmpage
Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/rdmpage
LinkedIn:  http://uk.linkedin.com/in/rdmpage
Twitter:  http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog:  http://iphylo.blogspot.com
ORCID:  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7101-9767
Citations:  http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=4Z5WABAAAAAJ
ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roderic_Page


On 8 Feb 2015, at 20:22, John Wieczorek <tuco at berkeley.edu<mailto:tuco at berkeley.edu>> wrote:

Hi Rod,

The verbatimLatitude, verbatimLongitude, and verbatimCoordinates were all intended to be able to capture the original coordinates used at the source, where decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude, with geodeticDatum, were meant to contain the the easy to act on global system (UTMs do not cover the entire planet, for example). The verbatimCoordinate term's definition shows that this was the intent, but verbatimLatitude and verbatimLongitude do not. When we get the examples separated from the term definitions, it should be easier to make this clear.

Cheers,

John

On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Dag Endresen <dag.endresen at gmail.com<mailto:dag.endresen at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi Rod,

At least in Norway, it is very common for the GBIF node to receive
(only) Easting and Northing of UTM zones 32V to 36W. For many datasets
we will on routine automatically make the conversion to decimal
degrees (and WGS84) at the node before these datasets are published to
the GBIF portal. When people download occurrences from the Norwegian
"GBIF portal", Artskart, my impression is that the UTM 32V (and the
33V) Easting and Northing coordinate format is actually more popular
than the decimal degree format - this is because the geographic data
layers for Norway more often are made available in the UTM format
(most often 32V or 33V) [1]. And yes, this continued present day
official use of such a wide variety of coordinate formats frustrates
me too... The historic use reported with the verbatim terms, is of
course difficult to do anything with...

I assume that Easting and Northing coordinates are both valid and very
common values (and not only in Norway) for the Darwin Core verbatim
coordinate terms (dwc:verbatimLatitude and dwc:verbatimLongitude or
dwc:verbatimCoordinates), but of course only at all useful when
accompanied by the respective dwc:verbatimCoordinateSystem and
dwc:verbatimSRS also reported. (And that the dwc:decimalLatitude and
dwc:decimalLongitude correctly reported in WGS84 should preferably
also always be there). I believe that Darwin Core is already fine with
respect to terms to report geographic coordinates. If at all any
additions are useful, I believe that identifying and recommending
terms from more specialized geographic vocabularies and ontologies
might be much more useful than adding any new dwc:Location terms to
Darwin Core. In fact, most of the dwc:Location terms might perhaps
preferably be replaced by terms from the geography community... such
as perhaps [2] and [3] (as a start).

[1] https://dagendresen.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/convert-coordinate-srs/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#
[3] http://www.geonames.org/ontology/documentation.html

Regards
Dag


On 7 February 2015 at 13:02, Roderic Page <Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>> wrote:
> Pardon my ignorance, but has there ever been a discussion of easting and
> northing values in regards to Darwin Core? AFAIK the current standard
> doesn’t mention them. The reason I’m asking is that I’ve just come across
> some VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude values in a dataset that is
> aggregated by VertNet (and hence GBIF) where (after some head scratching) I
> realised that the verbatim values were actually Easting and Northing (which
> I didn’t know existed until yesterday). Details are here:
> https://github.com/ttu-vertnet/ttu-mammals/issues/11
>
> I’m guessing this isn’t a terribly common way to record location
> information, but it looks like in this case the lack of support for this
> type of data has resulted in somebody trying to shoehorn them into
> VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude, resulting in values which are
> uninterpretable to aggregators further up the chain.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
>

--
Dag Endresen, Ph.D.
Private email: dag.endresen at gmail.com<mailto:dag.endresen at gmail.com>
Work email: dag.endresen at nhm.uio.no<mailto:dag.endresen at nhm.uio.no>
Mobile: +47 4061 2982<tel:%2B47%204061%202982>
_______________________________________________
tdwg-content mailing list
tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org<mailto:tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org>
http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20150209/89766a11/attachment.html 


More information about the tdwg-content mailing list