[tdwg-content] Easting and northing

Dag Endresen dag.endresen at gmail.com
Mon Feb 9 12:41:03 CET 2015


Hi Rod,

I have assumed that the purpose of the dwc:verbatimCoordinates term is
to allow for reporting coordinates originally recorded as one single
tuple such as the MGRS (Military Grid Reference System).

While original source coordinates that do have two tuples such as UTM
would use dwc:verbatimLongitude (for the Easting or X coordinate
tuple) and dwc:verbatimLatitude (for the Northing or Y coordinate
tuple).

Regards
Dag


On 9 February 2015 at 11:57, Roderic Page <Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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
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>
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>
>
> On 8 Feb 2015, at 20:22, John Wieczorek <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> 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>
>> 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
>> Work email: dag.endresen at nhm.uio.no
>> Mobile: +47 4061 2982
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>
>
>



-- 
Dag Endresen, Ph.D.
Private email: dag.endresen at gmail.com
Work email: dag.endresen at nhm.uio.no
Mobile: +47 4061 2982


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