Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
Hi everyone,
I have noticed that use of the Darwin Core terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sometimes can be quite confusing. This confusion may arise when a term name does not reflect the content, like when the term stateProvince does not refer to a state or province, or when the term county does not refer to a county. Take my own country Sweden for example, where the Darwin Core term stateProvince refers to the name of a county, the term county refers to the name of a municipality, and the term municipality refers to the name of a parish...
As long as everyone stick to the definitions, literal meaning of term names doesn't really matters. Unfortunately, however, people sometimes tend to focus more on the literal meaning of term names than on the actual meaning of defined concepts. To make the Darwin Core terminology less confusing, I think words associated with geographic ranks should be removed from the term names. I suggest the following changes (you may come up with better ones yourself!):
“stateProvince” --> “countryFirstOrderSubdivision” “county” --> “countrySecondOrderSubdivision” “municipality” --> “countryThirdOrderSubdivision”
After having delved into the Darwin Core geography specifications, I also feel that these three terms would benefit from more consistent and clear-cut definitions. I have included proposed new definitions at the end of this mail. My intention is not to alter the meaning of any of the existing terms, just to make the definitions more precise. Each proposed new definition is also accompanied by a revised comment with examples.
To conclude, here are some questions to think about:
1) Would it be desirable to have other names for the terms stateProvince, county, and municipality? If so, what names should be used instead?
2) Are the current definitions of the terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sufficiently good? If not, how should they be defined? Does the definitions proposed here make things clearer?
3) Would more elaborate examples in the comments like the ones presented here improve the Darwin Core standard?
Looking forward to hear of any response!
Markus Englund Department of Biodiversity Informatics Swedish Museum of Natural History P.O. Box 50007 SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden
--------------------
SOME RELATED LINKS
Wikipedia: Table of administrative divisions by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_administrative_country_subdivisions_by...
UN Second Administrative Level Boundaries http://www.unsalb.org
UN Gazetetteer - a global place name database and search engine http://dma.jrc.it/services/gazetteer
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas http://www.gadm.org
--------------------
PROPOSED NEW DEFINITIONS AND COMMENTS
Term Name: countryFirstOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the primary administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the country term.
Comment: Examples: "Montana" (a federal state in the USA), "Minas Gerais" (a federative unit in Brazil), "Neuquén" (a province in Argentina), "Hesse" (a federal state in Germany), "Stockholms län" (a county in Sweden).
Term Name: countrySecondOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the second-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countryFirstOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Missoula" (a county located in the federal state Montana, USA), "Los Lagos" (a department located in the province Neuquén, Argentina), "Darmstadt" (a government district located in the federal state Hesse, Germany), "Sigtuna" (a municipality located in the county Stockholms län, Sweden).
Term Name: countryThirdOrderSubdivision
Definition: The name of the third-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countrySecondOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Hainburg" (a municipality located in the government district Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany), "Norrsunda" (a parish located in the municipality Sigtuna in Stockholms län, Sweden)
There's been a long history in collections databases of having a field named PrimaryDivision for top level (US state, Canadian province) level subdivisions of countries, and a field named SecondaryDivision for next level down (US county/UK shire/US parish) subdivisions of countries.
Below that, it can get a lot more complex and potentially overlapping, and municipality (at least in English) covers a lot of the complexity of towns, townships, villages, incorporated places, cities, etc.
-Paul
On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 23:47:38 +0200 Markus Englund jan.markus.englund@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have noticed that use of the Darwin Core terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sometimes can be quite confusing. This confusion may arise when a term name does not reflect the content, like when the term stateProvince does not refer to a state or province, or when the term county does not refer to a county. Take my own country Sweden for example, where the Darwin Core term stateProvince refers to the name of a county, the term county refers to the name of a municipality, and the term municipality refers to the name of a parish...
As long as everyone stick to the definitions, literal meaning of term names doesn't really matters. Unfortunately, however, people sometimes tend to focus more on the literal meaning of term names than on the actual meaning of defined concepts. To make the Darwin Core terminology less confusing, I think words associated with geographic ranks should be removed from the term names. I suggest the following changes (you may come up with better ones yourself!):
“stateProvince” --> “countryFirstOrderSubdivision” “county” --> “countrySecondOrderSubdivision” “municipality” --> “countryThirdOrderSubdivision”
After having delved into the Darwin Core geography specifications, I also feel that these three terms would benefit from more consistent and clear-cut definitions. I have included proposed new definitions at the end of this mail. My intention is not to alter the meaning of any of the existing terms, just to make the definitions more precise. Each proposed new definition is also accompanied by a revised comment with examples.
To conclude, here are some questions to think about:
- Would it be desirable to have other names for the terms
stateProvince, county, and municipality? If so, what names should be used instead?
- Are the current definitions of the terms stateProvince, county,
and municipality sufficiently good? If not, how should they be defined? Does the definitions proposed here make things clearer?
- Would more elaborate examples in the comments like the ones
presented here improve the Darwin Core standard?
Looking forward to hear of any response!
Markus Englund Department of Biodiversity Informatics Swedish Museum of Natural History P.O. Box 50007 SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden
SOME RELATED LINKS
Wikipedia: Table of administrative divisions by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_administrative_country_subdivisions_by...
UN Second Administrative Level Boundaries http://www.unsalb.org
UN Gazetetteer - a global place name database and search engine http://dma.jrc.it/services/gazetteer
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas http://www.gadm.org
PROPOSED NEW DEFINITIONS AND COMMENTS
Term Name: countryFirstOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the primary administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the country term.
Comment: Examples: "Montana" (a federal state in the USA), "Minas Gerais" (a federative unit in Brazil), "Neuquén" (a province in Argentina), "Hesse" (a federal state in Germany), "Stockholms län" (a county in Sweden).
Term Name: countrySecondOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the second-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countryFirstOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Missoula" (a county located in the federal state Montana, USA), "Los Lagos" (a department located in the province Neuquén, Argentina), "Darmstadt" (a government district located in the federal state Hesse, Germany), "Sigtuna" (a municipality located in the county Stockholms län, Sweden).
Term Name: countryThirdOrderSubdivision
Definition: The name of the third-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countrySecondOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Hainburg" (a municipality located in the government district Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany), "Norrsunda" (a parish located in the municipality Sigtuna in Stockholms län, Sweden)
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
As a recovering algebraist, If I had to do solve this problem all over, I would probably make the model support not just a dynamically long ordered list of geopolitical objects, but a \tree/ or perhaps, better, a poset of such, with the no predetermined names for the types of the nodes. I think that this might meet the needs that both Markus and you put on the table.
Bob
On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Paul J. Morris mole@morris.net wrote:
There's been a long history in collections databases of having a field named PrimaryDivision for top level (US state, Canadian province) level subdivisions of countries, and a field named SecondaryDivision for next level down (US county/UK shire/US parish) subdivisions of countries.
Below that, it can get a lot more complex and potentially overlapping, and municipality (at least in English) covers a lot of the complexity of towns, townships, villages, incorporated places, cities, etc.
-Paul
On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 23:47:38 +0200 Markus Englund jan.markus.englund@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have noticed that use of the Darwin Core terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sometimes can be quite confusing. This confusion may arise when a term name does not reflect the content, like when the term stateProvince does not refer to a state or province, or when the term county does not refer to a county. Take my own country Sweden for example, where the Darwin Core term stateProvince refers to the name of a county, the term county refers to the name of a municipality, and the term municipality refers to the name of a parish...
As long as everyone stick to the definitions, literal meaning of term names doesn't really matters. Unfortunately, however, people sometimes tend to focus more on the literal meaning of term names than on the actual meaning of defined concepts. To make the Darwin Core terminology less confusing, I think words associated with geographic ranks should be removed from the term names. I suggest the following changes (you may come up with better ones yourself!):
“stateProvince” --> “countryFirstOrderSubdivision” “county” --> “countrySecondOrderSubdivision” “municipality” --> “countryThirdOrderSubdivision”
After having delved into the Darwin Core geography specifications, I also feel that these three terms would benefit from more consistent and clear-cut definitions. I have included proposed new definitions at the end of this mail. My intention is not to alter the meaning of any of the existing terms, just to make the definitions more precise. Each proposed new definition is also accompanied by a revised comment with examples.
To conclude, here are some questions to think about:
- Would it be desirable to have other names for the terms
stateProvince, county, and municipality? If so, what names should be used instead?
- Are the current definitions of the terms stateProvince, county,
and municipality sufficiently good? If not, how should they be defined? Does the definitions proposed here make things clearer?
- Would more elaborate examples in the comments like the ones
presented here improve the Darwin Core standard?
Looking forward to hear of any response!
Markus Englund Department of Biodiversity Informatics Swedish Museum of Natural History P.O. Box 50007 SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden
SOME RELATED LINKS
Wikipedia: Table of administrative divisions by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_administrative_country_subdivisions_by...
UN Second Administrative Level Boundaries http://www.unsalb.org
UN Gazetetteer - a global place name database and search engine http://dma.jrc.it/services/gazetteer
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas http://www.gadm.org
PROPOSED NEW DEFINITIONS AND COMMENTS
Term Name: countryFirstOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the primary administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the country term.
Comment: Examples: "Montana" (a federal state in the USA), "Minas Gerais" (a federative unit in Brazil), "Neuquén" (a province in Argentina), "Hesse" (a federal state in Germany), "Stockholms län" (a county in Sweden).
Term Name: countrySecondOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the second-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countryFirstOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Missoula" (a county located in the federal state Montana, USA), "Los Lagos" (a department located in the province Neuquén, Argentina), "Darmstadt" (a government district located in the federal state Hesse, Germany), "Sigtuna" (a municipality located in the county Stockholms län, Sweden).
Term Name: countryThirdOrderSubdivision
Definition: The name of the third-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countrySecondOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Hainburg" (a municipality located in the government district Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany), "Norrsunda" (a parish located in the municipality Sigtuna in Stockholms län, Sweden)
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Paul J. Morris Biodiversity Informatics Manager Harvard University Herbaria/Museum of Comparative Zoölogy mole@morris.net AA3SD PGP public key available _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor
Hi Gregor,
you are perfectly right. Such administrative hierarchies should not be described in a DwC record, but in some external gazetteer. We have geonames.org as a reference. If you provide a link to the lowest admistrative location (community), everybody can look up the broader levels there.
The levels of this hierarchy are different from nation to nation. There is some European approach to harmonize this, just forgot the name, but I may look up if someone is interested.
The drawback is that geonames does not use the "official" data. Governmental agencies may have a problem referring to geonames.org. In Germany, we are going to publish an "official" gazetteer soon, by October I guess, in a rather new R&D project "Linked Environment Data". http://innoq.github.com/led/
Best regards, Thomas
Am 29.08.2012 07:24, schrieb Gregor Hagedorn:
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Hi, if you have placenames from properly defined gazetteers, dwc offers a term pair for the literal & id value which is often very useful: dwc:locality & dwc:locationID
Because dwc:locationID is not limited to one specific encoding scheme, GBIF has created an initial guide for users how to make use of several frequently used encodings by using a short prefix together with the code itself: http://rs.gbif.org/areas/
Maybe this is something we can take forward to include more and more gazetteers?
The way dwc handles locations is very similar to scientific names. The both have a term for a literal and an ID in the lowest level, but then there are also terms for the literals of the higher classification. It really depends upon the use case, but in general I would say the lowest 2 terms are the ones we should use and trust most while the higher classification is usually just one view and rather a hint to what the lower pair means.
Markus
PS: I always found that Yahoo Where On Earth IDs have taken a very pragmatic approach by having some well defined placename "ranks" like country but still allow for a flexible typed hierarchy to some degree and also support multilingual names. For example the German town of "Odenthal" resolves like this:
<place yahoo:uri="http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/682822" xml:lang="en-US"> <woeid>682822</woeid> <placeTypeName code="7">Town</placeTypeName> <name>Odenthal</name> <country code="DE">Germany</country> <admin1 type="Land" code="DE-NW">North Rhine-Westphalia</admin1> <admin2 type="District" code="">Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis</admin2> <admin3/> <locality1 type="Town">Odenthal</locality1> <locality2/> <postal/> </place>
While the town of Bangor in Wales, UK resolves with totally different admin123 categories: <place yahoo:uri="http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/11768" xml:lang="en-US"> <woeid>11768</woeid> <placeTypeName code="7">Town</placeTypeName> <name>Bangor</name> <country code="GB">United Kingdom</country> <admin1 type="Country" code="GB-WLS">Wales</admin1> <admin2 type="County" code="GB-GWN">Gwynedd</admin2> <admin3/> <locality1 type="Town">Bangor</locality1> <locality2/> <postal type="Postal Code">LL57</postal> </place>
On 29.08.2012, at 08:42, Thomas Bandholtz wrote:
Hi Gregor,
you are perfectly right. Such administrative hierarchies should not be described in a DwC record, but in some external gazetteer. We have geonames.org as a reference. If you provide a link to the lowest admistrative location (community), everybody can look up the broader levels there.
The levels of this hierarchy are different from nation to nation. There is some European approach to harmonize this, just forgot the name, but I may look up if someone is interested.
The drawback is that geonames does not use the "official" data. Governmental agencies may have a problem referring to geonames.org. In Germany, we are going to publish an "official" gazetteer soon, by October I guess, in a rather new R&D project "Linked Environment Data". http://innoq.github.com/led/
Best regards, Thomas
Am 29.08.2012 07:24, schrieb Gregor Hagedorn:
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Thomas Bandholtz Principal Consultant
innoQ Deutschland GmbH Krischerstr. 100, D-40789 Monheim am Rhein, Germany http://www.innoq.com thomas.bandholtz@innoq.com +49 178 4049387
http://innoq.com/de/themen/linked-data (German) https://github.com/innoq/iqvoc/wiki/Linked-Data (English)
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here): Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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. 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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" N.Bailly@cgiar.org wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here): Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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. 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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue? UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it. Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" N.Bailly@cgiar.org wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here): Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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. 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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
_______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the Global Administrative Areas (GADM; http://www.gadm.org/) dataset, produced in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) < N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:
Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue? UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it. Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" < N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no
unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the
hierarchical links here):
Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or
municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county,
and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the
original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county,
and municipality?
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.
In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Fantastic! 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. 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? Also check if GADM has old stuff. BW Nicolas.
From: gtuco.btuco@gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com] On Behalf Of John Wieczorek Sent: Thursday, 2012 September 06 4:35 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Mark WIlden; Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the Global Administrative Areas (GADM; http://www.gadm.org/) dataset, produced in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) <N.Bailly@cgiar.orgmailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote: Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue? UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it. Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" <N.Bailly@cgiar.orgmailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here): Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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. 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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
_______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
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.
Chuck
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2012 7:16 PM To: tuco@berkeley.edu Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
Fantastic! 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. 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? Also check if GADM has old stuff. BW Nicolas.
From: gtuco.btuco@gmail.commailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com]mailto:[mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com] On Behalf Of John Wieczorek Sent: Thursday, 2012 September 06 4:35 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Mark WIlden; Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the Global Administrative Areas (GADM; http://www.gadm.org/) dataset, produced in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) <N.Bailly@cgiar.orgmailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote: Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue? UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it. Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" <N.Bailly@cgiar.orgmailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here): Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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. 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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
_______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Dear all,
These terms reflect an unfortunate legacy in the Darwin Core term names and a desire during the process of producing the standard to minimize the adverse impact on existing systems relying on these terms. Before embarking on changes to term names, please consider carefully what the impact will be and weigh this against retaining term names that don't accurately reflect the full range of possible content, but whose definitions (e.g., " The name of the next smaller administrative region than country (state, province, canton, department, region, etc.) in which the Location occurs. ") and commentary (e.g., http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location?ts=1346943697&updated=... ) do, or can with a little effort.
Cheers,
John
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Chuck Miller Chuck.Miller@mobot.orgwrote:
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.****
Chuck****
*From:* tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] *On Behalf Of *Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) *Sent:* Wednesday, September 05, 2012 7:16 PM *To:* tuco@berkeley.edu
*Cc:* Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?****
Fantastic!****
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.****
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?****
Also check if GADM has old stuff.****
BW****
Nicolas.****
*From:* gtuco.btuco@gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com] *On Behalf Of *John Wieczorek *Sent:* Thursday, 2012 September 06 4:35 AM *To:* Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) *Cc:* Mark WIlden; Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?****
An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the Global Administrative Areas (GADM; http://www.gadm.org/) dataset, produced in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained. ****
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) < N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:****
Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue? UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it. Nicolas.****
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" < N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no
unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the
hierarchical links here):
Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or
municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county,
and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the
original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county,
and municipality?
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.
In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content****
Enabling full consideration of the pros and cons, such as John has pointed out, would be the purpose of a formal process for change recommendation, public review and decision. But, that process would need to be initiated by someone. The future stretches out much farther than the past, and if change is needed, the best time to get started on it is now.
Chuck
From: gtuco.btuco@gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com] On Behalf Of John Wieczorek Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2012 10:04 AM To: Chuck Miller Cc: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish); tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
Dear all,
These terms reflect an unfortunate legacy in the Darwin Core term names and a desire during the process of producing the standard to minimize the adverse impact on existing systems relying on these terms. Before embarking on changes to term names, please consider carefully what the impact will be and weigh this against retaining term names that don't accurately reflect the full range of possible content, but whose definitions (e.g., " The name of the next smaller administrative region than country (state, province, canton, department, region, etc.) in which the Location occurs. ") and commentary (e.g., http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location?ts=1346943697&updated=... ) do, or can with a little effort.
Cheers,
John
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Chuck Miller <Chuck.Miller@mobot.orgmailto:Chuck.Miller@mobot.org> wrote: 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.
Chuck
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2012 7:16 PM To: tuco@berkeley.edumailto:tuco@berkeley.edu
Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
Fantastic! 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. 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? Also check if GADM has old stuff. BW Nicolas.
From: gtuco.btuco@gmail.commailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com [mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com]mailto:[mailto:gtuco.btuco@gmail.com] On Behalf Of John Wieczorek Sent: Thursday, 2012 September 06 4:35 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Mark WIlden; Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
An excellent source of administrative subdivision spatial data in the Global Administrative Areas (GADM; http://www.gadm.org/) dataset, produced in part under the BioGeomancer Project and still actively maintained.
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) <N.Bailly@cgiar.orgmailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote: Good point. There are gazetteers around, but will they address the complete administrative division hierarchy issue? UN? Space agencies? UNESCO? FAO? ISO? ... never encountered but did not look for it. Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Mark WIlden Sent: Thursday, 2012 August 30 10:40 AM To: Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) Cc: Chuck Miller; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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?
On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:14 PM, "Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish)" <N.Bailly@cgiar.orgmailto:N.Bailly@cgiar.org> wrote:
Dear All,
The problem to use name labels of divisions or ordinal labels has no unique solution, both have pros and cons.
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).
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.
Example: Locality: Riva-Bella beach Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella
In the global database, we would have the hierarchy (I don't show the hierarchical links here): Country: France Administrative division category: Commune Administrative division name: Ouistreham-Riva-Bella Country: France Administrative division category: Département Administrative division name: Calvados Country: France Administrative division category: Région Administrative division name: Basse-Normandie
The service will resolve the name of the Commune (= city or municipality) and give its region Basse-Normandie, no need to store this information.
No formal need to repeat the country as above but more practical. And indeed countries are gathered by continent and by TDWG standard.
Seems to be huge, but is it so? 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.
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. 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.
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.
Nicolas.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Miller Sent: Wednesday, 2012 August 29 10:40 PM To: Gregor Hagedorn; Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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.
I presume that was the basis for the inclusion of these terms in the original Darwin Core. Is this incorrect?
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.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 12:25 AM To: Markus Englund Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
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. In Germany we have states, then a next level (administrative district, "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...
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.
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.
Gregor _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
_______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.orgmailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Markus, I think this is a terrific suggestion. I am particularly drawn to the statement "Darwin Core terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sometimes can be quite confusing."
Why don't you submit this as a formal change request to Darwin Core where it can be formally considered?
Instructions for submission are here: http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/SubmittingIssues
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Markus Englund Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 4:48 PM To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [tdwg-content] Change of DwC terms stateProvince, county, and municipality?
Hi everyone,
I have noticed that use of the Darwin Core terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sometimes can be quite confusing. This confusion may arise when a term name does not reflect the content, like when the term stateProvince does not refer to a state or province, or when the term county does not refer to a county. Take my own country Sweden for example, where the Darwin Core term stateProvince refers to the name of a county, the term county refers to the name of a municipality, and the term municipality refers to the name of a parish...
As long as everyone stick to the definitions, literal meaning of term names doesn't really matters. Unfortunately, however, people sometimes tend to focus more on the literal meaning of term names than on the actual meaning of defined concepts. To make the Darwin Core terminology less confusing, I think words associated with geographic ranks should be removed from the term names. I suggest the following changes (you may come up with better ones yourself!):
"stateProvince" --> "countryFirstOrderSubdivision" "county" --> "countrySecondOrderSubdivision" "municipality" --> "countryThirdOrderSubdivision"
After having delved into the Darwin Core geography specifications, I also feel that these three terms would benefit from more consistent and clear-cut definitions. I have included proposed new definitions at the end of this mail. My intention is not to alter the meaning of any of the existing terms, just to make the definitions more precise. Each proposed new definition is also accompanied by a revised comment with examples.
To conclude, here are some questions to think about:
1) Would it be desirable to have other names for the terms stateProvince, county, and municipality? If so, what names should be used instead?
2) Are the current definitions of the terms stateProvince, county, and municipality sufficiently good? If not, how should they be defined? Does the definitions proposed here make things clearer?
3) Would more elaborate examples in the comments like the ones presented here improve the Darwin Core standard?
Looking forward to hear of any response!
Markus Englund Department of Biodiversity Informatics Swedish Museum of Natural History P.O. Box 50007 SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden
--------------------
SOME RELATED LINKS
Wikipedia: Table of administrative divisions by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_administrative_country_subdivisions_by...
UN Second Administrative Level Boundaries http://www.unsalb.org
UN Gazetetteer - a global place name database and search engine http://dma.jrc.it/services/gazetteer
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas http://www.gadm.org
--------------------
PROPOSED NEW DEFINITIONS AND COMMENTS
Term Name: countryFirstOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the primary administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the country term.
Comment: Examples: "Montana" (a federal state in the USA), "Minas Gerais" (a federative unit in Brazil), "Neuquén" (a province in Argentina), "Hesse" (a federal state in Germany), "Stockholms län" (a county in Sweden).
Term Name: countrySecondOrderSubdivision
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the second-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countryFirstOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Missoula" (a county located in the federal state Montana, USA), "Los Lagos" (a department located in the province Neuquén, Argentina), "Darmstadt" (a government district located in the federal state Hesse, Germany), "Sigtuna" (a municipality located in the county Stockholms län, Sweden).
Term Name: countryThirdOrderSubdivision
Definition: The name of the third-order administrative division below country level in which the Location occurs. The named region should be a subdivision of the region referred to in the countrySecondOrderSubdivision term.
Comment: Examples: "Hainburg" (a municipality located in the government district Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany), "Norrsunda" (a parish located in the municipality Sigtuna in Stockholms län, Sweden)
_______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
participants (10)
-
Bailly, Nicolas (WorldFish) -
Bob Morris -
Chuck Miller -
Gregor Hagedorn -
John Wieczorek -
Mark WIlden -
Markus Döring -
Markus Englund -
Paul J. Morris -
Thomas Bandholtz