Hi John
Darwin Core is able to transmit Gazetteer IDs for the kind of objects you are talking about (generally called "features" or "named places") that are present in gazetteers. Not only that, gazetteers can have detailed information (georeferences with uncertainties) about places with complex descriptions as well as simple named places. BioGeoBIF does this, and a Locality service I have long wanted to build has exactly this intention. What Darwin Core can't do is give a gazetteer id for some part of the Location, only for the whole. In other words, it can't do what you want it to do. I don't think Darwin Core should. I think the far better solution is to use universal terms - the spatial data - for the use case you are proposing.
There is a big difference between city being S. Francisco and the location being detail inside of it, and city being S. Francisco and the location being 200 km S of it.
So for the use case where the the detailed location is inside the boundaries defined by a gazeetter ID, I am still assuming that DWC can transmit the data ONLY if no more detailed data are given. Or this a misunderstanding?
Note that the need for gazetteer IDs arises primarily because multiple cities or villages, even within a state, bear the same name. In part that could be solved by fully citing all administrative subdivisions, but in our experience this is extremely tough (in part because the data are unavailable, in part because these division change every year - in Germany we of course have had even more drastic changes, which made even the normally relatively reliable states problematic. Gazetter IDs are nice and stable.
It seems to me undesirable to be able to analyse records where the collectors did not care to add detailed information (such as in a collection only citing the city name) and unable to analyse any records where in addition to the same city name a careful collector also provided additional information. However, according to your definitions, this is presently the situation with DWC.
I have to assume that by "analyse" you mean "query for". In any case, the DwC supports both - by spatial data as mentioned above and by substring querying on the locality term.
No I mean aggregate and compare.
Or could we even accept the IPTC Extension 1.1 as a relevant standard and accept its definitions (I previously wrongly quoted a version 2, I meant the 1.1. Also note that these fields are not new, they have been moved from core to extension.
The link to the specs is here:
http://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata%28200...
It defines for the {location detail} class the following properties (available as RDF vocabularies)
World Region Country ISO-Code Country Name Province or State City Location Details Sublocation
These would be committing the same mistakes that make DwC problematic for geographic subdivisions as it currently stands. If DwC is to change, it seems to me that it should be for the better, not for a similar alternative.
I disagree. I think IPTC and xmp have been carefully drafted by very capable and pragmatic people. That includes the digital still image and video recorder manufactures who currently implement these standards (see http://www.metadataworkinggroup.org/members/).
I personally think undefined terms like geohierarchy1 to geohierarchy8 are not very practical, easily misunderstood or abused, not amendable for human consumption, liable to be not interpretable (where higher and lower geographic regions have the same name). I think the proposal is not in the laudably pragmatic spirit of most of the current Darwin Core.
Gregor