[tdwg-tag] Unresloved technical issues - proposed decisions.

[joel sachs]

Gregor -

I stole the "trophic level" field from the 300 Committee bioblitz data 
sheet. They used a controlled vocabulary consisting of {primary producer 
(pp); herbivore (h); primary carnivore (pc); higher-level carnivore (hc); 
decomposer (d)}. It was pretty cool (for me) to see the shape of the food 
web emerge (coloured pins on a poster board) as the observations came in. 
Yes, those designations are attributes of species, don't really change 
across ecosystems, and could, in theory, be assigned in post-processing. 
But I liked having it in the form, as it encouraged thinking on the part 
of observers.

An early draft of documentation for the data fields is here: 
http://groups.google.com/group/tdwg-bioblitz/web/tdwg-bioblitz-profile-v1-1

I will post a revised version to the wiki. These will be guidelines; it is 
up to the app developers to decide what fields they want to include, and 
how to walk the line between completeness and simplicity. Essentially, the 
data profile should be interpreted as saying "If you use fields with 
these names, the following syntax and semantics will be assumed ..."

Best -
Joel.




On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:

> Out of curiosity (you play above my level :-) ) I took a look at the
> proposed columns. Two random notes:
>
> trophicLevel seems a bit odd for occurrence data - are some organisms
> sometimes on one level and sometimes on another?
>
> Is there a vocabularly for that? I just wonder where to put my fungi...
>
> -------
>
> dateTime
>
> can I the choose semantics? :-)
> it might be playing safe to make sure already in the label whether
> this shall be dateTime of observation, accession, data entry, etc. pp.
>
> Gregor
>