Currently, searching for records by place data in Arctos on the main catalog record page is confusing and not streamlined. Some fields search by locality spatial data (coordinates), some by text (from multiple different fields), and some by both. This is not immediately clear, as many of these fields are missing information in the documentation pop-ups.
A UI update that groups fields together with subheadings, or organizes them more thoughtfully would be useful.
The main reason for this issue is that data describing location of things collected in a waterbody are very unstandardized. You can have watery locality data in: Higher Geography (which has some oceans and seas) and Specific Locality (which can be any text data; and you might need to have your waterbody data here because you ALSO need to pick an administrative area for Higher Geography instead).
You can also search by Associated Names, which are chosen by a service based on which spatial shapes intersect with the coordinates (but this is resource limited). And you can search with a polygon or by selecting a drop down from
All of these search capabilities and fields are useful in their own ways, but they are all slightly different and give different results depending on the data. Because Waterbody in Arctos is not standardized (way less standardized than terrestrial data), searching for different things gives different results (which again isn't necessarily terrible because each is useful for different things) but the overall process is opaque.
Hopefully this helps explain our need for the Darwincore Waterbody field. Then we could search by this one field and pull up every record we want regardless of if there are coordinates, if Associated Names have been applied, what the Higher Geography is, etc.
Example with DMNS:Inv courtesy of @sharpphyl :
Search on "Any Geographic Element" and get 1,818 results. The results include every field in the Place and Time section including Event Remarks, so it includes records that have only Gulf of Mexico in a remark but aren't from there. See https://arctos.database.museum/guid/DMNS:Inv:10908 as an example.
Search on Geography Shape Name for "Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico." It times out and you get nothing.
Search on Specific Locality and you get 13 entries.
Search on Feature for Gulf of Mexico and you get nothing
Search on water body for Gulf of Mexico and, as you would expect, you get nothing (that code table has been left empty)
Go bigger and click on North Atlantic Ocean (asserted) and you get 66 entries.
Do a spatial search (which may go beyond the Gulf's official boundaries) and you get 2,840 records.
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Related Issues: https://github.com/ArctosDB/code-table-work/issues/59 , most recent activity in https://github.com/orgs/ArctosDB/projects/30
Currently, searching for records by place data in Arctos on the main catalog record page is confusing and not streamlined. Some fields search by locality spatial data (coordinates), some by text (from multiple different fields), and some by both. This is not immediately clear, as many of these fields are missing information in the documentation pop-ups. A UI update that groups fields together with subheadings, or organizes them more thoughtfully would be useful.
The main reason for this issue is that data describing location of things collected in a waterbody are very unstandardized. You can have watery locality data in: Higher Geography (which has some oceans and seas) and Specific Locality (which can be any text data; and you might need to have your waterbody data here because you ALSO need to pick an administrative area for Higher Geography instead). You can also search by Associated Names, which are chosen by a service based on which spatial shapes intersect with the coordinates (but this is resource limited). And you can search with a polygon or by selecting a drop down from
All of these search capabilities and fields are useful in their own ways, but they are all slightly different and give different results depending on the data. Because Waterbody in Arctos is not standardized (way less standardized than terrestrial data), searching for different things gives different results (which again isn't necessarily terrible because each is useful for different things) but the overall process is opaque. Hopefully this helps explain our need for the Darwincore Waterbody field. Then we could search by this one field and pull up every record we want regardless of if there are coordinates, if Associated Names have been applied, what the Higher Geography is, etc.
Example with DMNS:Inv courtesy of @sharpphyl :