The reason is simple, we want to help data publishers. It doesn't help data publishers if they can't publish what they have - it would mean there is no room for data improvement tools. That would be sad. Worse, most people haven't a clue what a datum is, or how it can ruin your whole day (or life, in at least one sad case of a crashed helicopter in Patagonia). Given this naiveté, people would simply put whatever geographic coordinates they have into geo:lat/lon and no one would have any way to know that they are incorrect.

Note that Darwin Core offers data publishers options to publish event information with year, month, day, startDayOfYear, endDayOfYear, and verbatimEventDate in addition to eventDate and eventTime - same philosophy.

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 7:26 AM, Javier de la Torre <jatorre@gmail.com> wrote:
I am not sure I understand why we can not set DWC fields to conform to WGS84 and then use what everybody else is using.

For example in eventDate DWC conforms to ISO 8601, why dont we do the same for location... it would allow to simplify it quite a lot and be more compliant with other standards-existing apps, etc.

Just an idea.

Javier de la Torre

On Aug 9, 2010, at 4:13 PM, John Wieczorek wrote:

The partially good news is that if enough information (dwc:geodeticDatum) is given in a Darwin Core-based record, geo:lat/lon can be determined from it. More disturbing to me is that anyone would think geo:lat/lon alone is sufficient for any application, as it carries no notion of uncertainty and therefore fitness for use. Add dwc:coordinateUncertaintyInMeters (or even dwc:coordinatePrecision if you must) to the mix and I would be much happier.


On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 11:26 PM, <Garry.Jolley-Rogers@csiro.au> wrote:
Hi Jim,
       Thanks. Had this aside to read in detail later.  I think John is right... As same value with different constraints mean different interpretations are possible and seems to be the key thing. How are the values to be interpreted.

G

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Croft [mailto:jim.croft@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, 9 August 2010 4:12 PM
To: Alexander, Paul (PI, Black Mountain); Harvey, Paul.W (PI, Black Mountain); Jolley-Rogers, Garry (PI, Black Mountain); Cawsey, Margaret (CES, Crace); Greg Whitbread
Cc: tuco@berkeley.edu
Subject: Fwd: [tdwg-tag] time and space namespaces in Darwin Core

Did you catch this thread on tdwg-tag?  It is an almost exact mirror
of the conversations we have be having in the taxon profile space, but
involving the specimen locational data.

>From John's comments it would appear he is not prepared to accept the
geo: and dwc: lat/long as 'exact match' because, although they are the
same values, they have different constraints (or more precisely one
one has a constraint and one doesn't).

I wouldn't have picked it but this looks like a case for 'closematch'.

jim


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Wieczorek <tuco@berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 3:56 AM
Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] time and space namespaces in Darwin Core
To: joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu>
Cc: tdwg-bioblitz@googlegroups.com, tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org


There is actually no equivalency between dwc:decimalLatitude and
geo:lat  because geo:lat is specified to represent the latitude in the
WGS84 spatial reference system and dwc:decimalLatitude has no such
such restriction.

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 10:08 AM, joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 6 Aug 2010, Hilmar Lapp wrote:
>
> > Shouldn't the RDF for DwC link DwC:lat to geo:lat (using some subtype
> > or better yet equivalency relation)? And shouldn't hence Linked Data
> > browsers be able to use DwC:lat in the same way as geo:lat?
> >
>
> Yes. But no Linked Data browser I'm aware of applies
> owl:equivalentProperty assetions before rendering the data. (In fact, most
> do no reasoning at all.) I agree that, whatever our default display,
> it should include the appropriate mapping statements, either via an
> rdfs:seeAlso or similar link, or directly in the document.
>
>
> Joel.
>
>
> >       -hilmar
> >
> > On Aug 6, 2010, at 11:01 AM, joel sachs wrote:
> >
> >> All,
> >>
> >> When representing observation records in RDF, there are advantages
> >> to using Dublin Core and Geo (http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
> >> wgs84_pos#)
> >> namespaces where possible. For example, if we use DC:date, and
> >> geo:lat, geo:long, instead of DwC:eventDate, DwC:lat, and DwC:long,
> >> then Linked Data browsers can automatically map the records, plot
> >> them on a timeline, etc.
> >>
> >> My question is: What are the disadvantages to doing this? (For
> >> example, is this going to break someone's DwC validator?)
> >>
> >> Thanks -
> >> Joel.
> >>
> >
> > --
> > ===========================================================
> > : Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
> > ===========================================================
> >

_________________
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