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

[joel sachs]

Hi Gregor -

On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:

>> 3. To support crowdsourcing of image identification, alternative
>> identifications, arguments, etc., there will be a 2nd table with columns
>> {occurrence_id, scientificName, vernacularName, Kingdom, identifiedBy,
>> identificationResources, identificationRemarks}. One of each of these
>
> Add support for identification giving an id/id-source or guid instead
> of a string?
>

Yes - we should have a "taxonConceptID" column, as we do in the 
Occurrences table. In most cases, this will be filled out automatically 
after the observation has been entered, by a tool that maps names to 
guids. But, this being TDWG, you're right that some may identify the taxon 
with a guid. (I'd love to see this.)


> Also, "Kingdom" may not be known and changing, but
> dwc:nomenclaturalCode will always be. The same scientificName may
> refer to different organisms under different codes.

This columns exists to help disambiguate scientificName, since, as you 
point out, the same scientificName may refer to different 
organisms under different codes. (For example there are 
both Pieris shrubs and Pieris butterflies in Cape Cod.) Since this column 
gets filled in the field, I thought it should be intuitive, and that 
everyone would understand "Kingdom" with a small controlled vocabulary of 
choices. I agree it's not perfect, but neither are the codes.


>
>> 4. Multiple multimedia URLs will be listed in a single column, comma
>> separated.
>
> comma is valid character in URLs.
>

an oversight on my part.

Thanks -
Joel.

> ...Only alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], the special characters
> "$-_.+!*'()," [not including the quotes - ed], and reserved characters
> used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.
> - from RFC 1738
>
> Standard character to separate URL list elements would be the blank
>
> Gregor
>