Your arguably reasonable recoding of the geo uri's of your example illustrates an issue on which so much metadata is silent: provenance. Once exposed, it is probably impossible for someone to know how the uncertainty (or any other data that might be the subject of opinion or estimate) was determined and whether the data is fit for some particular purpose, e.g. that the species were observed near each other.
BTW, the IETF geo proposal was adopted in 2010, in the final form given at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870 . One interesting point is http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5870#section-3.4.3 which says "Note: The number of digits of the values in <coordinates> MUST NOT beinterpreted as an indication to the level of uncertainty." The section following is also interesting, albeit irrelevant for your procedure. It implies that when uncertainty is omitted (and therefore unknown), then "geo:41.53000000,-70.67000000" and "geo:41.53,-70.67" identify the same geo resource.
Bob Morris
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Peter DeVries pete.devries@gmail.comwrote:
[...]
- I added in my proposed "area" so that it is easy to see what species
were observed near each other. Since there was no measure of radius in these longitude and latitudes I made the radius 100 meters. Normally I would estimate the radius for a GPS reading to be within 10 meters but some of these observations were made where the GPS reading was taken and the readings were given only to two decimals.
Area = long, lat; radius in meters following the ietf proposal but with the precision of the long and lat standardized example "geo:41.53000000,-70.67000000;u=100"
[...]