emiliom
commented
9 years ago Except for the geological examples (rocks) that Kerstin mentioned recently, where the time of collection is not crucial (and may not be known exactly), I think collection time is typically the most important piece of information. But I can think of a couple of other tricky issues:
- Analyses involving radioactive decay, like 14C. Collection time is still the most important time, scientifically, but analysis time is critical in order to account for decay since collection.
- Same for materials that may have a risk of undergoing biological transformation.
- Process rate experiments involving multiple analyses over time
But I can imagine YODA files being used in at least two different ways:
- Conveying a lot of lab and analytical details
- Conveying just final results (eg, the process rate value, not the individual measurements or intermediate steps involved)
I would imagine that for CZOData, the majority of cases will be more like the second one.
I don't know if these comments help you in any way, but there they are.
What times are really the most important in the specimen excel template? My experience is almost entirely with water samples where the collection time is really what's important. In this case, the only time most users would have is the sample collection time and the template would use that same time for both the specimen collection action in the Actions block and the value date time in the MeasurementResultValues block. But the sample analysis time is often un-tracked or completely unknown so the result-producing specimen analysis action will not have any time associated with it.
I know there will also certainly be cases with specimens where neither the collection nor the analysis time will be known and therefor all of the times will be blank.
But are there cases where the time associated with the value date/time should be the analysis date time? Should it be up to the user?
And, as a side note, we really need to figure out how we are going to deal with missing times in ODM2, because right now they are required fields in a number of tables.