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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>That’s true, but it does not resolve the issue originally raised by Markus Englund about the confusion in DwC terms. stateProvince is still confusing in situations when the first political division is neither state nor province. County is still confusing where there’s no county. The three DwC political division terms seem very North American and I hope Markus submits the change request to DwC.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Chuck<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)<br><b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, September 05, 2012 7:16 PM<br><b>To:</b> tuco@berkeley.edu<br><b>Cc:</b> Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'>Fantastic!</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'>So DwC should be adapted in such a way that the lowest administrative area in the collection record is linked to GADM, hoping that GADM can develop the required webservices, or develop such services in GBIF, or else.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'>And invite the TDWG community to help GADM for checking and improving. Not sure if the geographic group is still active there. Could be discussed in Beijing in October?</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'>Also check if GADM has old stuff.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'>BW</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'>Nicolas.</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#002060'> </span><o:p></o:p></p><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> <a href="mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com">gtuco.btuco@gmail.com</a> <a href="mailto:[mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com]">[mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com]</a> <b>On Behalf Of </b>John Wieczorek<br><b>Sent:</b> Thursday, 2012 September 06 4:35 AM<br><b>To:</b> Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)<br><b>Cc:</b> Mark WIlden; Chuck Miller; <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the Global Administrative Areas (GADM; <a href="http://www.gadm.org/" target="_blank">http://www.gadm.org/</a>) dataset, produced in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained. <o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal>On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) <<a href="mailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org" target="_blank">N.Bailly@cgiar.org</a>> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue?<br>UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it.<br><span style='color:#888888'>Nicolas.</span><o:p></o:p></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><br>-----Original Message-----<br>From: <a href="mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org</a>] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden<br>Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM<br>To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)<br>Cc: Chuck Miller; <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?<br><br>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?<br><br><br><br>On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" <<a href="mailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org" target="_blank">N.Bailly@cgiar.org</a>> wrote:<br><br>> Dear All,<br>><br>> The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.<br>><br>> 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).<br>><br>> 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.<br>><br>> Example:<br>> Locality: Riva-Bella beach<br>> Country: France<br>> Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division<br>> name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella<br>><br>> In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here):<br>> Country: France<br>> Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division<br>> name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella<br>> Country: France<br>> Administrative division category: Département Administrative division<br>> name: Calvados<br>> Country: France<br>> Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name:<br>> Basse-Normandie<br>><br>> The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.<br>><br>> No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical.<br>> And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.<br>><br>><br>> Seems to be huge, but is it so?<br>> 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.<br>><br>> 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.<br>> 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.<br>><br>> 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.<br>><br>> Nicolas.<br>><br>> -----Original Message-----<br>> From: <a href="mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> [mailto:<a href="mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org</a>] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller<br>> Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM<br>> To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund<br>> Cc: <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?<br>><br>> 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.<br>><br>> I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?<br>><br>> 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.<br>><br>> Chuck<br>><br>> -----Original Message-----<br>> From: <a href="mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> [mailto:<a href="mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org</a>] On Behalf Of Gregor<br>> Hagedorn<br>> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM<br>> To: Markus Englund<br>> Cc: <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?<br>><br>> 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.<br>> In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district,<br>> "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...<br>><br>> 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.<br>><br>> 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.<br>><br>> Gregor<br>> _______________________________________________<br>> tdwg-content mailing list<br>> <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> <a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content" target="_blank">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content</a><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> tdwg-content mailing list<br>> <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> <a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content" target="_blank">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content</a><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> tdwg-content mailing list<br>> <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br>> <a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content" target="_blank">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content</a><br>_______________________________________________<br>tdwg-content mailing list<br><a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content" target="_blank">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content</a><br>_______________________________________________<br>tdwg-content mailing list<br><a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content" target="_blank">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content</a><o:p></o:p></p></div></div></div><p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p></div></div></body></html>