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elevation: how to deal with below sea level? #447

Open myrmoteras opened 6 years ago

myrmoteras commented 6 years ago

How to deal with -550m below sea level?

see eg ejt-173

gsautter commented 6 years ago

What even is "minus 550 meters below sea level"? +550 above sea level? The current MC parser should read this as an elevation of -550 meters (completely ignoring the minus), but then it might be that "-550 m" is tagged as a quantity (distance in particular) at some point before, and the "quantity (above|below) sea level" pattern kicks in. In which case we'd simply have a double negation on our hands, which to resolve I'd tend see as something for the original author of the publication. We can well deal with some fuzziness and sloppiness, but not in such binary cases.

Being fuzzy, I'd interpret this as (the absolute) "550 meters below sea level" (ignoring the negative signum in the presence of "below"), but I'm not exactly sure right here.

Ultimately, it would most likely be up to a human reader to see that the article is about some marine species, and thus is talking "below" rather than "above" sea level. But involving such background understanding is beyond implementation for now.