[tdwg-content] Clarification about values for dwc:county

Dag Endresen dag.endresen at gmail.com
Mon Apr 13 09:03:50 CEST 2015


Hi Steve

Geonames seems to be using gn:name="Missoula County"
http://sws.geonames.org/5666648/about.rdf
http://www.geonames.org/5666648/missoula-county.html

Could something along the lines of
dwciri:county="http://sws.geonames.org/5666648/" perhaps be useful?

Regards
Dag

On 13 April 2015 at 01:12, Steve Baskauf <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> Yes, I agree.  It probably is a usage issue.  If there is a mixture of usage
> with some people reporting it one way ("Missoula") and others reporting it
> the other way ("Missoula County"), then I would probably include the "
> County" part.  However, if nearly everyone omits the last part, then I don't
> want to expose DwC data that doesn't play well with what is conventional,
> and I would omit the last part.
>
> Steve
>
>
> Bob Morris wrote:
>
> This may be a usage issue not a definition issue. For example if you search
> for the form of notarized signature in u.s. states, you will probably
> conclude that most or all states require a form County of _______________.
> In turn this and its sisters may be derived from the Uniform Commercial
> Code.  But other legal docs may have different conventions.  One could wish
> that a best practice would be to follow local practice for legal names of
> such named entities as counties.  But my guess is that in the U.S. this is
> full of huge state to state variation arising from historical events,
> especially colonial ones.
> Bob
>
> On Apr 12, 2015 10:35 AM, "Steve Baskauf" <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu>
> wrote:
>>
>> The definition of dwc:county is: "The full, unabbreviated name of the
>> next smaller administrative region than stateProvince (county, shire,
>> department, etc.) in which the Location occurs."  What I'm wondering
>> about is whether the "full" name includes the second part to the name as
>> it's typically written in the U.S. and Canada.  "Missoula" is given as
>> an example.  However, the full name of that county in Montana is
>> actually "Missoula County".  If there were consistency in second parts
>> of county names, one could just assume that one adds " County" after the
>> value given for dwc:county.  However, there isn't consistency.  In
>> Louisiana, it's "Washington Parish".  In Alaska, names usually end with
>> "Borough" (e.g. "Denali Borough"), although sometimes they don't (e.g.
>> "Dillingham Census Area").  Outside the U.S. and Canada, there may be no
>> second part to the name, or it might be something completely different.
>>
>> I am having a problem with this when I try to display values of
>> dwc:county on a web page.  Currently I have some rules that involve
>> examining the country and the value of dwc:stateProvince to decide what
>> to append after the first part of the name. But they don't work for
>> Alaska and if I just said "Dillingham, Alaska" that would really be
>> wrong if I meant the Dillingham Census Area and not the city of
>> Dillingham.  It would be easier to display them if the second part of
>> the name were included in the value.
>>
>> Is there a convention on this?  I was assuming that it would be to omit
>> the second part of the name, but since the definition says "full,
>> unabbreviated name", I'm not sure.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> --
>> Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
>> Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
>>
>> postal mail address:
>> PMB 351634
>> Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.
>>
>> delivery address:
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>> 1161 21st Ave., S.
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>>
>> office: 2128 Stevenson Center
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>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
> Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
>
> postal mail address:
> PMB 351634
> Nashville, TN  37235-1634,  U.S.A.
>
> delivery address:
> 2125 Stevenson Center
> 1161 21st Ave., S.
> Nashville, TN 37235
>
> office: 2128 Stevenson Center
> phone: (615) 343-4582,  fax: (615) 322-4942
> If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
> http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
> http://vanderbilt.edu/trees
>
>
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-- 
Dag Endresen, Ph.D.
Private email: dag.endresen at gmail.com
Work email: dag.endresen at nhm.uio.no
Mobile: +47 4061 2982
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2352-5497


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