[tdwg-content] Easting and northing

Mon Feb 9 18:56:38 CET 2015

I could live with that recommendation given that the grid systems are not
strictly latitudes and longitudes.

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Markus Döring <m.doering at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi Rod & John,
>
> for the future documentation of dwc I’d be curious if we all think it is a
> good idea to overload verbatimLongitude/Latitude with not strictly lon/lat
> values like easting and northing.
> I *think* I would prefer a definition, comment and examples where UTM
> values go into the verbatimCoordinates field only, even though it would be
> great to not have to parse them out from a string.
>
> Any strong opinions?
>
>
> On 09 Feb 2015, at 17:25, Roderic Page <Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>  Hi John,
>
>  I guess my concern is that the TTU dataset in VertNet/GBIF didn’t
> explicitly say that the verbatimLatitude/Longitude were easting and
> northings (other values it has in those fields for other records are lats
> and longs), nor did it include the zone information, or the fact that the
> values were for south of the equator (TTU itself doesn’t say that either).
> I had to go back to the TTU web site to discover that.
>
>  So, even if parsing is a mess (and I agree it pretty much always is) the
> TTU output didn’t have everything needed to figure out how to parse the
> data correctly. It would be nice if the data that gets to the aggregator is
> complete enough to be interepreted, leaving aside in what fields people
> stick that information.
>
>  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
> 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 9 Feb 2015, at 16:12, John Wieczorek <tuco at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
>  Hi Rod,
>
>  I would treat easting and northing as latitude and longitude, but not
> following strictly the definition in Darwin Core. There is actually value
> in being able to have the easting (longitude) separate from the northing
> (latitude) if the source has them separated. It makes it that much less
> ambiguous to interpret. I would also have that full tuple as in the example
> you gave (18M 166624 9840350) along with "UTM" in
> verbatimCoordinateSystem, and a datum or something similar in verbatimSRS.
> We want more information, not less, when it comes time to try to turn this
> all into more readily usable information (decimalLatitude,
> decimalLongitude, geodeticDatum, coordinateUncertaintyInMeters). All of
> this verbatim separation arose from the heyday of massive collaborative
> georeferencing in MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS where we were able to take good
> advantage of whatever information the source had, and that is why
> verbatimCoordinateSystem is part of the offerings, to help with tha parsing
> problem if the original source is known.
>
>  In short, I wouldn't have it any other way than the way it is done with
> TTU. It actually allows use to extract more information correctly rather
> than less. Parsing is a mess, but it is a mess anyway. It takes me about 25
> steps to parse the variations I see in verbatim coordinates in VertNet. but
> it is worth it.
>
>  Now, to get back to TTU and upgrade their venerable migrator and see how
> things look afterwords. We appreciate the careful eye and the quality
> feedback reports to Github on TTU's behalf.
>
>  Cheers,
>
>  John
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 8:50 AM, Roderic Page <Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Dag,
>>
>>  Gack, this is where things get messy. I wouldn’t treat easting and
>> northing as latitude and longitude (although they are obviously related).
>> When I write code to parse verbatim latitude and longitude the last thing I
>> expect is  easting and northing (it’s hard enough already given the various
>> ways people write lats and longs). There seems to be enough ambiguity here
>> to really mess things up, as indeed they have for the TTU dataset.
>>
>>  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
>> 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 9 Feb 2015, at 11:41, Dag Endresen <dag.endresen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
>> Graham Kerr Building
>> University of Glasgow
>> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>>
>> Email:  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> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> tdwg-content mailing list
>> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dag Endresen, Ph.D.
>> Private email: dag.endresen at gmail.com
>> Work email: dag.endresen at nhm.uio.no
>> Mobile: +47 4061 2982
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> tdwg-content mailing list
>> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>>
>>
>
>   _______________________________________________
> tdwg-content mailing list
> 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/ba063744/attachment.html 