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D-PLACE / dplace-legacy

D-PLACE: Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment (OLD)
https://d-place.org/
MIT License
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Some issues in regions #80

Closed SimonGreenhill closed 8 years ago

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Issue by SimonGreenhill Monday Aug 11, 2014 at 14:10 GMT Originally opened as https://github.com/NESCent/dplace/issues/110

Typos -e.g. 'Papuasia', 'Malesia'

Also not the best for e.g. Austronesian (Pacific). Adjust shape files?

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by dleehr Monday Aug 11, 2014 at 14:40 GMT

Current regions are loaded from TDWG level 2 shapefile, could use any shapefile for regions.

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by dleehr Monday Aug 11, 2014 at 14:41 GMT

Fixing typos are critical for first release

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by SimonGreenhill Tuesday Aug 12, 2014 at 18:20 GMT

Ok, my mistake. Malesia/Papuasia are biogeographic labels. Need to revise/generate a shape file.

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by SimonGreenhill Wednesday Oct 29, 2014 at 03:26 GMT

@kirbykat - can you and Carlos discuss this at the next meeting?

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by dleehr Friday Oct 31, 2014 at 18:59 GMT

Discussed in meeting, advised to use WWF eco regions. Don't use regions so fine. @kirbykat to provide details

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by dleehr Friday Oct 31, 2014 at 19:34 GMT

From http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/conservation-science-data-and-tools

http://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/terrestrial-ecoregions-of-the-world

There are 867 terrestrial ecoregions, classified into 14 different biomes such as forests, grasslands, or deserts. Ecoregions represent the original distribution of distinct assemblages of species and communities.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/global-200

This process yielded 238 ecoregions--the Global 200--comprised of 142 terrestrial, 53 freshwater, and 43 marine priority ecoregions.

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by kirbykat Saturday Nov 01, 2014 at 04:09 GMT

Hi all,

I've taken a closer look at the ecoregions file, and I'm not sure it's as good a fit as I thought. Some of the ecoregions are very small, so not particulary useful for selecting on a map. As Dan points out, there are >800 polygons in the initial dataset (Carlos, if you have another dataset with only 200 or so, can you let us know what it is?)

Here are some alternatives:

In addition to the small polygons, an issue with this approach is whether/how to include the option of searching by country. The nice thing about the way the map search is currently set up in DPLACE is that when you select a region, the countries included in that region pop up above and you can sub-select from them (as I understand it). We could do this with the biomes, but countries would not be perfectly enclosed by a biome, so it would get messier...

Dan, how difficult/much work would it add to give users the choice of searching by a continent map, vs, biome map, vs. region map?

Thanks, Kate

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by kirbykat Saturday Nov 01, 2014 at 11:33 GMT

I think using the 17 or so biomes from the sane paper is appropriate in this case.

C

On Saturday, November 1, 2014, Kate Kirby kate.kirby@utoronto.ca wrote:

Hi all,

I've taken a closer look at the ecoregions file, and I'm not sure it's as good a fit as I thought. Some of the ecoregions are very small, so not particulary useful for selecting on a map. As Dan points out, there are

800 polygons in the initial dataset (Carlos, if you have another dataset with only 200 or so, can you let us know what it is?)

Here are some alternatives:

  • I tried intersecting biomes (of which there are only 16) by continents. This gives 80 polygons. Some sections are very narrow/small (e.g., alpine zones), so could be difficult to select. I've attached a screenshot, and you can download the shapefile (and a .csv file of biome names) here to take a look: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1862061/ biomesXcontinents.zip

In addition to the small polygons, an issue with this approach is whether/how to include the option of searching by country. The nice thing about the way the map search is currently set up in DPLACE is that when you select a region, the countries included in that region pop up above and you can sub-select from them (as I understand it). We could do this with the biomes, but countries would not be perfectly enclosed by a biome, so it would get messier...

  • Use major latitude lines to divide continents into smaller sections. E.g., Tropical-Subtropical, Temperate, Arctic...
  • Use ESRI's continents-regions-countries. The regions in this dataset may be more typical (see screenshot, and shapefile here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1862061/Continent_region_country.zip)
  • Use the maps Dan has currently meshed with DPLACE, but rename the regions.

Dan, how difficult/much work would it add to give users the choice of searching by a continent map, vs, biome map, vs. region map?

Thanks, Kate

Carlos A. Botero, Ph. D. Biocomplexity Initiative and Global Change Center 3528 Thomas Hall North Carolina State University

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by SimonGreenhill Saturday Nov 01, 2014 at 11:44 GMT

I guess the question is, what's the unit of analysis going to be? Keeping in mind that anyone who wants to do complex stuff will be able to download the data and do it themselves, then we just need to make the interface cover the majority use case.

My feeling is that majority use is something like "choose a part of the globe I'm interested in" or "choose a language family I'm interested in". We could enforce analyses at the level of the language family (at least in the interface), so the regions become something like "Austronesia"... "Mayan" ... (regions identified by span of those families) etc. This would be simple and handy for selecting a group of related cultures. Otherwise Dan's regions looked about right, we could just rename them.

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by dleehr Monday Nov 03, 2014 at 19:47 GMT

The nice thing about the way the map search is currently set up in DPLACE is that when you select a region, the countries included in that region pop up above and you can sub-select from them (as I understand it)

Actually the text that pops up above corresponds 1:1 with a selected region on the map. There isn't any aggregation of countries or sub-selection possible.

Dan, how difficult/much work would it add to give users the choice of searching by a continent map, vs, biome map, vs. region map?

It's a medium-scale feature to have selectable maps. More than a day, probably a week or two of effort estimated. I suspect we're not going to have the capacity to add more medium/large features to the first release milestone. If selectable maps need to be in the milestone, we'd need to cut something else.

Renaming existing regions (creating a spreadsheet for the name mapping), using a different shapefile for the map, and changing colors are small-scale features and I'd say are part of the milestone.

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by dleehr Tuesday Nov 04, 2014 at 20:54 GMT

Update on map regions

  1. I fixed the offsets in the current map (tdwg-level-2) regions, had to tweak the shapefile before converting it to JS. Have not changed any text #169
  2. I tried the continents-regions-countries map. This worked and plots just fine, but the clickable regions are country-sized. I'd need to merge the country polygons into regions and I don't know an easy way to do this and not sure how long it'll take to figure out. Probably a 5 minute task for someone who knows how!

So the next steps would be either to decide on another shapefile for the regions, or provide corrections for region names in the tdwg-level-2 file.

SimonGreenhill commented 9 years ago

Comment by kirbykat Tuesday Nov 11, 2014 at 07:08 GMT

Hi Dan,

Here is a link to a zipped folder containing two shapefiles. One is of regions only, the other is regions+continents.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1862061/REGION.zip

The region names in this file correspond to those in the last file you were working with (countries-regions-continents -- I think?), so it should be straightforward to identify the countries in each of these regions using the info contained in the .dbf attribute table of that previous file. (If, say, we wanted those to appear when a user clicked on a region, as they did in the last map you had -- I thought that was a neat feature, even if the countries weren't sub-selectable).

Let me know if this works or if I can send something else, Kate

SimonGreenhill commented 8 years ago

Closing this as I think it's solved.