VertNet / bels

Biodiversity Enhanced Location Services
Apache License 2.0
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Return all georeferences when cannot find a 'best' georef #55

Open juliema opened 2 years ago

juliema commented 2 years ago

Currently when there are multiple georeferences (or coordinates, for coordinate-only matches) for a location BELS will go through the decision rules to determine if a 'best' georeference can be found (e.g. one with an uncertainty that includes all the other georeferences), if one cannot be found no georeference is returned.

this is problematic because in theory this issue may never be resolved. Users will need to georeference that location continuously and if those new georeferences, once incorporated into GBIF and into BELS, do not have a large enough uncertainty then this location will still not return a 'best' georeference in the future and will be georeferenced again and again.

I wonder if we could instead give the user all the georeferences if there is 'no match' in this specific case, that way they can plot them and make a decision based on their own knowledge. This at least gives the user SOME information by which they may be able to quickly georeference.

tucotuco commented 2 years ago

This will be useful for African Plants TCN, which is funded.

tucotuco commented 2 years ago

An additional useful metric from an API would be the count of matching georeferences by matching string.