Hi Steve
Geonames seems to be using gn:name="Missoula County" http://sws.geonames.org/5666648/about.rdf http://www.geonames.org/5666648/missoula-county.html
Could something along the lines of dwciri:county="http://sws.geonames.org/5666648/" perhaps be useful?
Regards Dag
On 13 April 2015 at 01:12, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
Yes, I agree. It probably is a usage issue. If there is a mixture of usage with some people reporting it one way ("Missoula") and others reporting it the other way ("Missoula County"), then I would probably include the " County" part. However, if nearly everyone omits the last part, then I don't want to expose DwC data that doesn't play well with what is conventional, and I would omit the last part.
Steve
Bob Morris wrote:
This may be a usage issue not a definition issue. For example if you search for the form of notarized signature in u.s. states, you will probably conclude that most or all states require a form County of _______________. In turn this and its sisters may be derived from the Uniform Commercial Code. But other legal docs may have different conventions. One could wish that a best practice would be to follow local practice for legal names of such named entities as counties. But my guess is that in the U.S. this is full of huge state to state variation arising from historical events, especially colonial ones. Bob
On Apr 12, 2015 10:35 AM, "Steve Baskauf" steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
The definition of dwc:county is: "The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller administrative region than stateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs." What I'm wondering about is whether the "full" name includes the second part to the name as it's typically written in the U.S. and Canada. "Missoula" is given as an example. However, the full name of that county in Montana is actually "Missoula County". If there were consistency in second parts of county names, one could just assume that one adds " County" after the value given for dwc:county. However, there isn't consistency. In Louisiana, it's "Washington Parish". In Alaska, names usually end with "Borough" (e.g. "Denali Borough"), although sometimes they don't (e.g. "Dillingham Census Area"). Outside the U.S. and Canada, there may be no second part to the name, or it might be something completely different.
I am having a problem with this when I try to display values of dwc:county on a web page. Currently I have some rules that involve examining the country and the value of dwc:stateProvince to decide what to append after the first part of the name. But they don't work for Alaska and if I just said "Dillingham, Alaska" that would really be wrong if I meant the Dillingham Census Area and not the city of Dillingham. It would be easier to display them if the second part of the name were included in the value.
Is there a convention on this? I was assuming that it would be to omit the second part of the name, but since the definition says "full, unabbreviated name", I'm not sure.
Steve
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-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it. http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu http://vanderbilt.edu/trees
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