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International-Soil-Radiocarbon-Database / ISRaD

Repository for the development and release of ISRaD data and tools
https://international-soil-radiocarbon-database.github.io/ISRaD/
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New ISRaD extra column - MRT #146

Closed aahoyt closed 4 years ago

aahoyt commented 5 years ago

Let's add mean residence time which is often reported in papers, but not currently included as it's a calculated value.

greymonroe commented 5 years ago

do we need another function for this?

greymonroe commented 5 years ago

@aahoyt I can add this if you give me the details and equation

aahoyt commented 5 years ago

Thanks! I'm not sure if we just want to add a column where people can type it in from the paper where it is already calculated, or if we want to do systematic calculations across the database. Some more thinking would be required for that.

alkalifly commented 5 years ago

It seems to me we have two independent questions to consider.

The first question is: Should we add a new column to enter mean residence times as reported in the original sources? This would have to be part of the master template, rather than part of ISRaD_extra. It could also be accompanied by an additional column for notes about the method the authors used to derive whatever value they reported (or this could just go into the layer/fraction notes column). To me, it seems the answer to this question is, "sure, why not?" because it is easy to implement, it doesn't affect anything else, and it allows for more original information to be retained.

The second question is: Should we add an ISRaD_extra function to derive mean residence times for all reported radiocarbon values? Of course, it would require making certain assumptions (i.e., choosing a model) to derive this value. Perhaps there could even be multiple derived values for multiple models/sets of assumptions. This "value added" data would be, ultimately, more useful than individual reported values, because all residence times would be consistent with each other. It would be a bit more complicated to implement compared to simply adding a new column, but would not really be that hard to implement. The only hard part would be selecting which models/assumptions to use.