Wishing recordedBy to be available in Event table

[anneliejonsson]

At present recordedBy can only be placed in the Occurrences table. In situations where an event yielded no observations, this information is "lost" unless one adds zero-counts in the Occurrences table. This could result in a very long list of species being reported with zero individuals, which seems rather cumbersome.

A more logical solution would in my opinion be to include recordedBy in the Event table instead.

I have had a reply from helpdesk already that "having the recordedBy available for events would require relatively invasive changes in the way we process and store sampling events." I'm fine with this reply, but was asked to log my question here all the same.

My solution to the problem with events without occurrences will for now be to add one line in the Occurrences table where I report absent/0 individuals of the highest taxonomic level for the type of organisms that were looked for in the survey, in my case "birds" (i.e. Aves as scientific name, and the GUID urn:lsid:dyntaxa.se:Taxon:40001044000104 as taxonID). That way I can include surveyor under recordedBy. Among a few alternatives presented to helpdesk (including putting surveyor in the emof), this was the alternative they favoured, as it will enable searches based on surveyor.

/AJ

[albenson-usgs]

I posted a similar question to the Darwin Core Hour github. https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/issues/151

[anneliejonsson]

Thanks! @albenson-usgs