ArctosDB / arctos

Arctos is a museum collections management system
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Request - new catalog record attribute #8271

Open Jegelewicz opened 2 weeks ago

Jegelewicz commented 2 weeks ago

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Describe what you're trying to do

I have 195 birth dates to add to UWBM:Mamm records. these are zoo or lab animals with known dates of birth and sometimes dates of death that are NOT the same as the date of collection. Because we record "death date" as verbatim preservation date with the date as the value, I think it would be best to record date of birth with the date in the value. In this way, one could determine the numeric age by subtracting one date from the other.

BUT verbatim preservation date is free text - meaning there is all kinds of weirdness in there, so:

I propose two new attributes:

date of birth - The date an organism was born. Values can take the form of any date as described in https://handbook.arctosdb.org/documentation/dates.html. http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/NCIT_C25296

date of death - The date an organism ceased to be alive. Values can take the form of any date as described in https://handbook.arctosdb.org/documentation/dates.html. http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/NCIT_C70810

Values in verbatim preservation date should be converted to date of death and that attribute removed from the code table.

I do not believe the community is ready to record these dates as events, which requires significantly more time and effort. It may be more correct, but is also more resource-intensive. However, I would also be open to two new record event types:

birth - Event at which an organism was born. http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/NCIT_C25155

death - Event at which an organism ceased to live. http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/NCIT_C28554

My concern with this method is that many of the records that exist currently should also include a death event that would be the same as the collection event if we want consistent data.

A timely resolution would be nice as @jebrad would like to get these recorded as part of his RANGES work.

see also

https://github.com/ArctosDB/arctos/issues/6110 https://github.com/ArctosDB/arctos/issues/1256 https://github.com/ArctosDB/arctos/issues/5600