Re: [tdwg-content] dwc: city to county
At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
--------
1. While studying the available terms for describing biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary), we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
--------
2. If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
--------
3. The definition of county (perhaps better more international as "County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone) - something like "countrySubdivision1" and "countrySubdivision2". I will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan-shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub-district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorng.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote:
At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
- While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary), we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
- If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer
stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
- The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
This message is sent on a personal basis and does not constitute an activity of the German Federal Government or its research institutions. Together with any attachments, this message is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed and may not be redistributed or published without permission. _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Hi John
I fully understand that the topic is sensitive and that it is probably difficult to find the best compromise. The reason I suggest city/village names is that we can find them in gazetteers; the utility of them is thus greatly increased if they are separated out of a free-form full text location (NLP of that being significantly more difficult). The problem I anticipate is much less having them always in the right hierarchy-field - if they can be matched to the gazetteer, that can to a large extent be simply discovered (but of course there are counties and cities that have the same name).
The other two notes were really mostly about clarifying a name and a definition, not changing much.
Since you indicate that you may be willing to change significantly more, I may want to note that the digital media people have the same problems, and had to make pragmatic compromises. I personally find the pragmatic compromise described in the IPTC extension quite convincing. It offers a hierarchy, it does not require you to class the highest region into the water/land/island classes dwc requires, it uses slightly more international terms, and it has a city or place name.
But this is a matter of personally preference of course. Personally I believe in the impact of the digital media standards. I believe that GPS recording images will trickle down to every camera - the tempation of combining your holiday pictures with some interactive mapping tool is just very tempting and lots of fun, and future observation databases might perhaps recommend providing an image voucher, with automatically recorded geolocation. I would therefore even recommend that dwc directly reuses the IPCT extension 2.0 terms and definitions (for the hierachy fields, leaving the dwc freeform-text split as an addition). But I also can think of lots of reasons (existing dwc user base, etc.) against this.
Gregor
This reminds me of another question I had for a long time. If I want to express a species is found within a protected area X or within the tdwg biogeographic region "AGS-TF, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)" or as a yahoo where-on-earth-id, how would I encode this with dwc? Should I use dwc:locality, dc:location or through the new terms dwc:locationID? Is there a way to specify the "reference system" so others know where my ids come from?
Markus
On Aug 13, 2009, at 21:30, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone)
- something like "countrySubdivision1" and "countrySubdivision2". I
will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan-shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub-district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorn<g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com
wrote: At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
- While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/ MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary), we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
- If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer
stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
- The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
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For your first cases - protected areas or tdwg biogeographic regions (and many other categories of places) - use the higherGeography term. The comment for the term already shows an example containing a protected area:
Example: "South America; Argentina; Patagonia; Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi; Neuquén; Los Lagos" with accompanying values "South America" in Continent, "Argentina" in Country, "Neuquén" in StateProvince, and Los Lagos in County.
In the case of the id, use locationID. If the value given in locationID isn't resolvable all on its own (thus providing the reference system), then it isn't a global identifier and it will have meaning only within the data set.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
This reminds me of another question I had for a long time. If I want to express a species is found within a protected area X or within the tdwg biogeographic region "AGS-TF, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)" or as a yahoo where-on-earth-id, how would I encode this with dwc? Should I use dwc:locality, dc:location or through the new terms dwc:locationID? Is there a way to specify the "reference system" so others know where my ids come from?
Markus
On Aug 13, 2009, at 21:30, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone)
- something like "countrySubdivision1" and "countrySubdivision2". I
will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan-shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub-district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorng.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote:
At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
- While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary), we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
- If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer
stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
- The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
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so this would be acceptable?
locationID="AGS-TF" higherGeography="Argentina;Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi" countryCode="AR"
it would be great to be able to specify the reference system for the id. I guess I have to make it a global ID "somehow" inventing URI schemes for non existing ones?
locationID="tdwg:AGS-TF" locationID="ISO3166:AR" locationID="ISO3166:ARG" locationID="WOEID:564721"
It wont be understood everywhere and there is no guarantee it really is globally unique, but it is probably good enough for most use cases and if the exchanging people agree on scheme prefixes it will work. Notmuch different from having a seperate reference term.
thanks john! Markus
On Aug 18, 2009, at 17:56, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
For your first cases - protected areas or tdwg biogeographic regions (and many other categories of places) - use the higherGeography term. The comment for the term already shows an example containing a protected area:
Example: "South America; Argentina; Patagonia; Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi; Neuquén; Los Lagos" with accompanying values "South America" in Continent, "Argentina" in Country, "Neuquén" in StateProvince, and Los Lagos in County.
In the case of the id, use locationID. If the value given in locationID isn't resolvable all on its own (thus providing the reference system), then it isn't a global identifier and it will have meaning only within the data set.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
This reminds me of another question I had for a long time. If I want to express a species is found within a protected area X or within the tdwg biogeographic region "AGS-TF, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)" or as a yahoo where-on-earth-id, how would I encode this with dwc? Should I use dwc:locality, dc:location or through the new terms dwc:locationID? Is there a way to specify the "reference system" so others know where my ids come from?
Markus
On Aug 13, 2009, at 21:30, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone)
- something like "countrySubdivision1" and "countrySubdivision2". I
will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan- shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub- district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorn<g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com
wrote:
At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
- While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary) , we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
- If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly
prefer stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
- The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
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Seems like if the locationID is referring to a value in a standard (in this case a term in a vocabulary) it should be resolvable, so why not locationID=rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF or something like that?
The extremely important thing that may be slipping through the cracks in this discussion is that the locationID should be the identifier for the whole content of the Location part of the record, not just one part of it.
In other words the following combination would be appropriate:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality={null}
but the following combination would not:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality="seashore on route from city of Ushuaia to Ushuaia airport"
John
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
so this would be acceptable?
locationID="AGS-TF" higherGeography="Argentina;Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi" countryCode="AR"
it would be great to be able to specify the reference system for the id. I guess I have to make it a global ID "somehow" inventing URI schemes for non existing ones?
locationID="tdwg:AGS-TF" locationID="ISO3166:AR" locationID="ISO3166:ARG" locationID="WOEID:564721"
It wont be understood everywhere and there is no guarantee it really is globally unique, but it is probably good enough for most use cases and if the exchanging people agree on scheme prefixes it will work. Notmuch different from having a seperate reference term.
thanks john! Markus
On Aug 18, 2009, at 17:56, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
For your first cases - protected areas or tdwg biogeographic regions (and many other categories of places) - use the higherGeography term. The comment for the term already shows an example containing a protected area:
Example: "South America; Argentina; Patagonia; Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi; Neuquén; Los Lagos" with accompanying values "South America" in Continent, "Argentina" in Country, "Neuquén" in StateProvince, and Los Lagos in County.
In the case of the id, use locationID. If the value given in locationID isn't resolvable all on its own (thus providing the reference system), then it isn't a global identifier and it will have meaning only within the data set.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
This reminds me of another question I had for a long time. If I want to express a species is found within a protected area X or within the tdwg biogeographic region "AGS-TF, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)" or as a yahoo where-on-earth-id, how would I encode this with dwc? Should I use dwc:locality, dc:location or through the new terms dwc:locationID? Is there a way to specify the "reference system" so others know where my ids come from?
Markus
On Aug 13, 2009, at 21:30, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone)
- something like "countrySubdivision1" and "countrySubdivision2". I
will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan-shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub-district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorng.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote:
At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
- While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary), we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
- If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer
stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
- The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
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I was thinking of using the terms for synthesized species distributions, not individual occurrence records. Initially I thought about using locality to specify a "named area", but I figured the term is too small scale for this use. Really I am looking for a term to represent the terminal named area, no matter what "rank" it is. locationID is perfect, ideally in company with dc/ dwc:location, but dwc:higherGeography might do the trick.
Markus
On Aug 18, 2009, at 18:47, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Seems like if the locationID is referring to a value in a standard (in this case a term in a vocabulary) it should be resolvable, so why not locationID=rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF or something like that?
The extremely important thing that may be slipping through the cracks in this discussion is that the locationID should be the identifier for the whole content of the Location part of the record, not just one part of it.
In other words the following combination would be appropriate:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality={null}
but the following combination would not:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality="seashore on route from city of Ushuaia to Ushuaia airport"
John
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
so this would be acceptable?
locationID="AGS-TF" higherGeography="Argentina;Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi" countryCode="AR"
it would be great to be able to specify the reference system for the id. I guess I have to make it a global ID "somehow" inventing URI schemes for non existing ones?
locationID="tdwg:AGS-TF" locationID="ISO3166:AR" locationID="ISO3166:ARG" locationID="WOEID:564721"
It wont be understood everywhere and there is no guarantee it really is globally unique, but it is probably good enough for most use cases and if the exchanging people agree on scheme prefixes it will work. Notmuch different from having a seperate reference term.
thanks john! Markus
On Aug 18, 2009, at 17:56, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
For your first cases - protected areas or tdwg biogeographic regions (and many other categories of places) - use the higherGeography term. The comment for the term already shows an example containing a protected area:
Example: "South America; Argentina; Patagonia; Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi; Neuquén; Los Lagos" with accompanying values "South America" in Continent, "Argentina" in Country, "Neuquén" in StateProvince, and Los Lagos in County.
In the case of the id, use locationID. If the value given in locationID isn't resolvable all on its own (thus providing the reference system), then it isn't a global identifier and it will have meaning only within the data set.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
This reminds me of another question I had for a long time. If I want to express a species is found within a protected area X or within the tdwg biogeographic region "AGS-TF, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)" or as a yahoo where-on-earth-id, how would I encode this with dwc? Should I use dwc:locality, dc:location or through the new terms dwc:locationID? Is there a way to specify the "reference system" so others know where my ids come from?
Markus
On Aug 13, 2009, at 21:30, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone)
- something like "countrySubdivision1" and
"countrySubdivision2". I will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan- shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub- district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorn<g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com
wrote:
At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to the dwc effort:
- While studying the available terms for describing
biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, such as dc or xmp, see http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary) , we note the conspicuous absence of
** city or place name **
The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in the future routinely used on digital images. dwc has
http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Has Domain: Definition: A spatial region or named place.
and
Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or standardize the description. Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 (=Ruta 237)". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text.
In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC?
- If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly
prefer stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is the province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as administration province of a state of the federal republic (Regierungsbezirk).
- The definition of county (perhaps better more international as
"County or Subprovince") is:
Term Name: county Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller political region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For discussion see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location
Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the literal definition above would require to map county to Regierungsbezirk.
Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones.
I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps:
Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant political region between cities or villages and states or provinces (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Gregor
Dr. Gregor Hagedorn Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 12167 Berlin skype: g.hagedorn
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First, realize that dcterms:Location (not dcterms:location) is a class, not a property. The terminal (most specific) named area should go in dwcterms:locality.
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
I was thinking of using the terms for synthesized species distributions, not individual occurrence records. Initially I thought about using locality to specify a "named area", but I figured the term is too small scale for this use. Really I am looking for a term to represent the terminal named area, no matter what "rank" it is. locationID is perfect, ideally in company with dc/dwc:location, but dwc:higherGeography might do the trick.
Markus
On Aug 18, 2009, at 18:47, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Seems like if the locationID is referring to a value in a standard (in this case a term in a vocabulary) it should be resolvable, so why not locationID=rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF or something like that?
The extremely important thing that may be slipping through the cracks in this discussion is that the locationID should be the identifier for the whole content of the Location part of the record, not just one part of it.
In other words the following combination would be appropriate:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality={null}
but the following combination would not:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality="seashore on route from city of Ushuaia to Ushuaia airport"
John
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
so this would be acceptable?
locationID="AGS-TF" higherGeography="Argentina;Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi" countryCode="AR"
it would be great to be able to specify the reference system for the id. I guess I have to make it a global ID "somehow" inventing URI schemes for non existing ones?
locationID="tdwg:AGS-TF" locationID="ISO3166:AR" locationID="ISO3166:ARG" locationID="WOEID:564721"
It wont be understood everywhere and there is no guarantee it really is globally unique, but it is probably good enough for most use cases and if the exchanging people agree on scheme prefixes it will work. Notmuch different from having a seperate reference term.
thanks john! Markus
On Aug 18, 2009, at 17:56, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
For your first cases - protected areas or tdwg biogeographic regions (and many other categories of places) - use the higherGeography term. The comment for the term already shows an example containing a protected area:
Example: "South America; Argentina; Patagonia; Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi; Neuquén; Los Lagos" with accompanying values "South America" in Continent, "Argentina" in Country, "Neuquén" in StateProvince, and Los Lagos in County.
In the case of the id, use locationID. If the value given in locationID isn't resolvable all on its own (thus providing the reference system), then it isn't a global identifier and it will have meaning only within the data set.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Markus Döringm.doering@mac.com wrote:
This reminds me of another question I had for a long time. If I want to express a species is found within a protected area X or within the tdwg biogeographic region "AGS-TF, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)" or as a yahoo where-on-earth-id, how would I encode this with dwc? Should I use dwc:locality, dc:location or through the new terms dwc:locationID? Is there a way to specify the "reference system" so others know where my ids come from?
Markus
On Aug 13, 2009, at 21:30, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
Hi Gregor and others,
I greatly appreciate the comments. It gives me the incentive to cover geographical issues that others have not touched yet in this discussion. Geographical division relationships are even more complex than taxonomic name hierarchies, and the DwC terms do not accommodate the full complexity that exists. Happily though, I don't think they have to.
The terms we have at the moment are those found most commonly in biodiversity databases and derive their names from an unfortunate North American geopolitical bias.
There are really four major problems. First, the names of geopolitical divisions (state, province, etc.) are quite diverse (see some statistics from the GADM database at the end of this message) and cannot be well represented by any term name based on only one of them. Second, the same term may apply to more than one level of subdivision (e.g., both "state" and "province" occur as first and second level subdivisions of countries; "county" and "city" both occur as first, second, and third level subdivisions). Third, two geopolitical subdivisions of countries are insufficient to capture the full diversity of subdivision systems in existence. Some countries have three, four, or even five subdivisions. Fourth, the use of a particular subdivision may be ignored in some contexts while not in others - there may be parallel or historical systems in use, one person's first-order subdivision may be another person's second order subdivision, or extra subdivisions may exist for some administrative areas. Germany's Regierungsbezirk is a perfect example of the latter - it exists within some Bundesländer and not within others.
I think the proposed "city" term would be a victim of all of the same issues that the stateProvince and county terms have.
How do we solve these problems satisfactorily?
Country and countryCode, I propose, can be left as is.
To be fair while solving the first and second problems, the terms used in DwC to atomize geographic subdivisions should be generic. The third and fourth problems suggest that atomic subdivisions within countries cannot be given unambiguous definitions. If their interpretation and content will vary, do they have utility?
I'd like to be a purist - to be complete, clear, and consistent. If I was, I'd propose only the following geographic terms:
countryCode, Locality, verbatimLocality
and I would count on georeferences to tell me the rest of what I need to know based on my own world view during the period of interest. Locality in this case would contain everything the contributor would have otherwise put in higherGeography, continent, waterBody, islandGroup, island, country, stateProvince, and county.
But I'm not a purist, I actually like things that are useful right now too. Some of the concepts above that the purist me would discard are actually useful from experience. I would put them in the following order of diminishing utility: stateProvince, county, higherGeography, country, waterBody, continent, island, islandGroup. Of these, two are extremely useful but have problematic names - "stateProvince" and "county". Though these have long historical precedents for use under these names, I am not averse to making them more generic (plenty of other names in DwC have had to be changed so as not to offend someone)
- something like "countrySubdivision1" and "countrySubdivision2". I
will actually make these changes unless I hear cogent arguments to the contrary, soon.
The remaining questions in my mind are, "Does there need to be a 'countrySubdivision3' term?" and "Why stop there? Why not include all 5 subdivision levels?" These I will not add unless there is support expressed for the idea by more than just me.
Mind you, none of the proposed solution will actually help Gregor to figure out where to put his city values, nor will it assure him that he can find all relevant records if he searches for a city value in a particular term because there is no guarantee that everyone shares his world view in their input data. Here again I argue that the only reasonable chance of success is through a spatial query, requiring all records to be georeferenced. Hey, at least there is a definitive solution. ;-)
The rest of this message contains information about the content of the GADM administrative areas database version 1.0, which informs the discussion above.
Counts of geopolitical subdivision types within countries: Level:Count 1:240 (in other words 240 names for administrative features such as "state", "province", etc. at the first subdivision of countries) 2:215 (...215 names for administrative features such as "county" at the second subdivision of countries) 3:126 4:25 5:2
Counts of geopolitical entities for each level: Level:Count 0:248 (countries) 1:3366 ("states", "provinces", etc.) 2:39136 ("counties", etc.) 3:99097 4:40550 5:3655
Names for geopolitical subdivisions from GADM version 1.0: Aboriginal Council, Administrative Area, Administrative Committee, Administrative County, Administrative Region, Administrative State, Administrative Zone, Aftonomi Monastiki Politia, Aimag, Amphoe, Amt, Anchal, AOk, Aprinki, Apskritis, Area, Arrondissement, Arrondissment, Assembly, Astedader Akababi, Atoll, Automonous Region, Autonomous Banner, Autonomous City, Autonomous Commune, Autonomous Community, Autonomous County, Autonomous Island, Autonomous Monastic State, Autonomous Okurg, Autonomous Prefecture, Autonomous Province, Autonomous Region, Autonomous Republic, Autonomous Sector, Autonomous Territory, Avtonomiuri Respublika, Avtonomnaya Oblast, Avtonomnyy Okrug, aymag, Baladiyah, Banner, Barangay, Bashkia, Bayan, Bezirke, Bibhag, Boma, Borough, Bundesland, Bundesländ, Canton, Canton Municipality, Capital, Capital City, Capital District, Capital Metropolitan City, Capital Region, Capital Territory, Castello, Census Area, Census Division, Centrally Administered Area, Cercle, Changwat, Chantun, Chartered Community, Chef-Lieu-Wilaya, Chiefdom, Chuan-shih, Circle, Circuit, Cité, City, City and Borough, City and County, City council, City Municipality, Ciudad Autónoma, Ciudades Autónomas, Clan, Colline, Comarca, Comarca Indígena, Comisaría, Commissiary, Communauté Urbaine, Commune, Commune and Prefecture, Commune and Préfecture, Commune Autonome, Commune Rural, Commune Urbaine, Commune-Cotiere, Community, Community Government Council, Comuna, Comunidad Autónoma, Concelho, Conservancy, Constituency, Constituent Country, Corregimiento, Corregimiento Departamento, Country, County, County City, County Municipality, Daerah Istimewa, Daerah Khusus Ibukota, Daerah-Daerah, Delegation, Departamento, Département, Department, Dependencias Federales, Dependency, Development Region, Diamerismata, Dìjíshì, Dìqu, Directly Governed City, District, District Council, District Municipality, Distrik, Distrikkaya, Distrikt, Distrito, Distrito Capital, Distrito Federal, Division, Do, Dzongkhag, Economic Prefecture, Eilandgebieden, Ekonomisk region, Emirate, Entity, Estado, Établissemnet Indien, Faritany Mizakatena, Faritra, Federal Dependency, Federal District, Federal State, Fivondronana, Fokontany, Fovaros, Fu, Fylke, Gemeente, Gemeinden, Gobolka, Gorod, Gorsovet, Governarate, Governorate, Grad, Gu, Gun, Guyŏk, Gwangyeoksi, Hamlet, Headquarter, Home Nation, Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Hot, Hsien, Huyện, Il, Improvement District, Independent City, Independent Town, Indian Government District, Indian Reserve, Indian Settlement, Indigenous Territory, Intendancy, Intendencia, Inuite Land, Island, Island Area, Island Council, Island Group, Island Municipality, Island Region, Itumalo, Jilla, Judet, Kabupaten, Kaghak, K'alak'i, Kampeng Nakhon, Kanton, Kata, Kata Ndogo, Kaupstadir, Kayaing, Ken, Khet, Khêt, Khetphiset, Khoueng, Khum, Kilil, King Amphoe, Kingdom, Kommun, Kommuneat, Kommuner, Kommunur, Kotamadya, Kraj, Kray, Kreisfreie Städte, Krong, Kunta, Lääni, Laen, Lake, Lalawigan, län, Land, Länd, Land Reserved, Landkreise, landskap, Landsvæði, Lansdele, League, Local Authority, Local Government Area, Local Government District, Localidad, Locality, Location, London Borough, London Borough (city), London Borough (royal), Lungsod, Maakond, Maakunta, Machi, Magisterial District, Marz, Maslikhat, Megye, Mehoz, Méng, Metropolis, Metropolitan Borough (city), Metropolitan City, Metropolitan County, Metropolitan District, Miesto Savivaldybe, Minor district, Mintaqah, Mis'ka Rada, Misto, Mkoa, Moughataas, Muderiah, Muhafazah, Mukim, Municipal, Municipal District, Municipalité, Municipalité De Canton, Municipalité De Cantons Unis, Municipalité De Paroisse, Municipalité Régionale de Comté, Municipality, Municipality / Mun. Council, Municipality/Municipal Council, Municipio, Município, Municipio Especial, Municipiu, Municpality, Munisipyo, Muong, Mura, Nahia, National Capital Area, National District, National Park, National Territory, Neighbourhood Democratic, Neutral City, New District, Nisga'a Land, Nisga'a Village, Nomos, Non Organisé, Northern Hamlet, Northern Village, Not Classified, Oblast, Oblast', Oblasy, Obshtina, Okres, Okrug, Opcine, Opština, Opštine, Ostan, Outlying Island, Parish, Parish Municipality, Parroquia, Parròquia, Part, Partido, Phum, Po, Poblacion, Población, Powiat, Prefecture, Préfecture, Prefecture City, Prefegitura, Principality, Probinsya, Propinsi, Province, Provincia, Província, Provincie, Provinsie, Pyine, Qark, Qí, Quận, Quarter, Qúndao, Raion, Raioni, rajoni, Rajono Savivaldybe, Rayon, Reef, Regencies, Regency, Região, Regierungsbezirk, Regiões autônoma, Region, Región, Région, Región Autónoma, Région Capitale, Regional Council, Regional County Municipality, Regional District, Regional District Electoral Area, Regional Municipality, Regione, Republic, Repuplikasi, Reserve, Réserve Indienne, Resort Village, Respublika, Ressort, Rreth, Rural City, Rural Commune, Rural Community, Rural district, Rural Municipality, Sahar, Savivaldybe, Sector, Sector Autónomo, Senatorial District, Settlement, Seutukunta, Sha'biyah, Sha'biyat, Shahar, Shahrestan, Shěng, Shi, Shire, Shìxiáqū, Si, Siyudad, Soum, Sous Colline, Sous-préfecture, Sous-régions, Special Administrative Region, Special Area, Special City, Special district, Special Municipality, Special Region, Special Ward, Specialized Municipality, Srok, State, Statistical Region, Statisticna Regije, Statutární město, Statutarstädte, Statutory City, Sub district, Sub location, Sub Town, Sub-chief, Sub-county, Sub-district, Subdivision of County Municipality, Subdivision of Unorganized, Sub-prefecture, Sub-Province, Sub-region, Sum, Summer Village, Sveitarfélög , sýsla, Syssel, Taarafa, Taluk, Tambon, Tarafa, Tèqū, Terre Inuite, Terres Réservées, Territoire, Territorial Authority, Territorial Unit, Territorio Nacional, Territory, Teslin Land, Teukbyeolsi, Than Pho, Thana, Thanh Pho, Thành phố trực thuộc tỉnh, Thi xa, Tỉnh, To, Town, Town Council, Townlet, Township, Township and Royalty, Traditional Authority, Traditional County, T'ŭkbyŏl Haengjeonggu, Uknown, Union Territor, Union Territory, Unitary Authority, Unitary Authority (city), Unitary Authority (county), Unitary Authority (wales, Unitary Authority (wales), Unitary District, Unitary District (city), Unitate Teritorială Autonomă, Unitatea Teritorială, United Cantons Municipality, United Counties, United County, Unknown, Unorganized, Upazila, Urban, Urban Commune, Urban district, Urban Prefecture, Velayat, Vikas Kshetra, Village, Village Cri, Village Naskapi, Village Nordique, Ville, Viloiati Mukhtori, Viloyat, Viloyati Avtonomii, Voblasts', Voivodeship, Ward, Water body, Waterbody, Welayat, Wilaya, Wilayat, Willaya, Wiloyat, Województwo, Woreda, Xiàn, Xiànjíshì, Xíngzhèng Wěiyuánhuì, Xīnqū, Yin, Zhíxiáshì, Zila, Zìzhìqí, Zizhiqu, Zìzhìqu, Zìzhìxiàn, Zìzhìzhou, Zìzhìzhōu, Zoba, Zone, Županija,
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Gregor Hagedorng.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote: > > At the moment I can only add small bits of geo-relevant comments to > the dwc effort: > > -------- > > 1. While studying the available terms for describing > biodiversity-related images for MRTG, trying to reuse as many dwc > terms as possible (unless higher priority standards already exists, > such as dc or xmp, see > > http://www.keytonature.eu/wiki/MRTG_Schema_v0.7#Geography_Vocabulary), > we note the conspicuous absence of > > ** city or place name ** > > The term is available in iptc geo extension and is likely to be in > the > future routinely used on digital images. dwc has > > http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location > Has Domain: > Definition: A spatial region or named place. > > and > > Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality > Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location > Definition: The specific description of the place. Less specific > geographic information can be provided in other geographic terms > (higherGeography, continent, country, stateProvince, county, > waterBody, island, islandGroup). This term may contain information > modified from the the original to correct perceived errors or > standardize the description. > Comment: Example: "Bariloche, 25 km NNE via Ruta Nacional 40 > (=Ruta > 237)". For discussion see > http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location > > However, the first is very wide, and does not give the information > that the type of object is a place or city name (it could be > circumscription names like a province), the second is free from text. > > In many densely populated areas, separating the city or village name > for easier finding is recommended, because these terms do occur in > gazetteers. Could this be added to DWC? > > -------- > > 2. If clarity is more important than brevity, I would greatly prefer > stateOrProvince over the current stateProvince, which literally is > the > province of a state, which more less exists in Germany as > administration province of a state of the federal republic > (Regierungsbezirk). > > -------- > > 3. The definition of county (perhaps better more international as > "County or Subprovince") is: > > Term Name: county > Identifier: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/county > Has Domain: http://purl.org/dc/terms/Location > Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller > political > region than StateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which > the Location occurs. > Comment: Examples: "Missoula", "Los Lagos", "Mataró". For > discussion > see http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Location > > Here, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County) suggests to > interpret the German Kreis as equivalent to county; however, the > literal definition above would require to map county to > Regierungsbezirk. > > Many countries have a hierarchy of adminstrative political regions, > and the highest may often not be the most relevant ones. > > I suggest to weaken the definition to a suggestions, perhaps: > > Definition: The full, unabbreviated name of the most relevant > political region between cities or villages and states or provinces > (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs. > > > Gregor > -- > --------------------------------- > Dr. Gregor Hagedorn > Heinrich-Seidel-Str. 2 > 12167 Berlin > skype: g.hagedorn > > This message is sent on a personal basis and does not constitute an > activity of the German Federal Government or its research > institutions. Together with any attachments, this message is intended > only for the person to whom it is addressed and may not be > redistributed or published without permission. > _______________________________________________ > 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
The extremely important thing that may be slipping through the cracks in this discussion is that the locationID should be the identifier for the whole content of the Location part of the record, not just one part of it.
In other words the following combination would be appropriate:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality={null}
but the following combination would not:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality="seashore on route from city of Ushuaia to Ushuaia airport"
I think this is somewhat impractical.
We have realistic chances of having locationIDs only on a higher geographic level. But these are extremely useful when dealing with geographic uncertainty.
It seems inappropriate to limit the use of gazetteer IDs - where available - for cities of villages to those records not having any further location details. Or do I miss something?
Gregor
Hi Gregor,
It is indeed practical to have ids for very specific localities, not just higher geographic features. But I think you misunderstood me. The localityID can apply to any level of granularity, but it should always be the id for the whole of the Location, not some arbitrary part of it, such as the stateProvince in one case and country in another.
In other words, if a country, stateProvince, and county were given with a localityID, that localityID should apply to the combination of the three (in other words, the county, within that stateProvince within that country). If a locality were also given, then the id shoould be for that locality within that county within that stateProvince within that country. The id could even apply to individual georeferences within named places.
John
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Gregor Hagedorng.m.hagedorn@gmail.com wrote:
The extremely important thing that may be slipping through the cracks in this discussion is that the locationID should be the identifier for the whole content of the Location part of the record, not just one part of it.
In other words the following combination would be appropriate:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality={null}
but the following combination would not:
locationID="rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/GeographicRegion#AGS-TF" higherGeopgraphy="Argentina, Tierra del Fuego" country="Argentina" countryCode="AR" stateProvince="Tierra del Fuego" locality="seashore on route from city of Ushuaia to Ushuaia airport"
I think this is somewhat impractical.
We have realistic chances of having locationIDs only on a higher geographic level. But these are extremely useful when dealing with geographic uncertainty.
It seems inappropriate to limit the use of gazetteer IDs - where available - for cities of villages to those records not having any further location details. Or do I miss something?
Gregor
participants (3)
-
Gregor Hagedorn -
John R. WIECZOREK -
Markus Döring