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HISPID Terms
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Location vs collecting locality #129

Open acvaughan opened 7 years ago

acvaughan commented 7 years ago

The definitions for the terms in the Location class mostly refer to a mix of "collecting locality" and "Location". e.g. "The name of the island group in which the Location occurs" "The verbatim original latitude for the Location" "The geodetic longitude of the collecting locality" "The name of the country in which the collecting locality is situated"

I think we should be consistent, and I think it makes more sense to refer to the collecting "locality" rather than "Location" (i.e. to the term, not the class).

What do others think?

ben3000 commented 7 years ago

+1

nielsklazenga commented 7 years ago

'Location' and 'locality' are different things, 'locality' being a property of 'Location'. I think we should be consistent too, but then we should use Location rather than locality.

To clarify, 'Location' is the actual spot where the collection was made (or the Event took place, if you wish). The locality and the geo-reference, as well as all the other properties in the Location class are different ways to describe the Location.

The use of the word Location in those descriptions is absolutely horrible, so I would happily forgo some consistency or accuracy to avoid that. Talking about horrible formulation, did we really use 'geodetic longitude'? That last example sounds like me.

I am not really disagreeing, but the Location/locality thing is a difficult one (if you care about language at least).

ben3000 commented 7 years ago

I don't think there is disagreement, but here's my go at explaining what I'm adding a "+1" to.

The words locality and location are synonyms in everyday language, while "Location" is the name of a class we've defined to represent a place we want to talk about. We also have a "locality" property on the Location class.

I (think I) agree with Alison that we should use "Location" to refer only to the RDF class, and thus prefer to use "location" or "locality" when we're using everyday language terms. To avoid confusion between the two ways we're using "locality", I favour using "location". Alternatively avoid these altogether and refer to the specimen:

"The name of the island group in which the specimen was collected" "The verbatim original latitude for the collecting location" "The geodetic longitude of the collecting location" "The name of the country in which the specimen was collected"

nielsklazenga commented 7 years ago

If you say it like that, there is indeed no disagreement. The two uses of the word 'locality' was my problem as well.

acvaughan commented 7 years ago

I'm confused now. Niels, you said "the use of the word Location in those descriptions is absolutely horrible", but then say that "the two uses of the word "locality" was my problem as well".

I don't care which we go for (though I think "location" sounds a bit clunky"), but I still think consistency is good. I'm having a semantic issue with my specimen/preservedSpecimen/collection object issue from yesterday, but I'll post about it over there.

nielsklazenga commented 7 years ago

Well, that is exactly the problem. I would prefer to use 'locality', but in Darwin Core our 'locality' is 'Location' and the Darwin Core 'locality' has a more specific meaning as just one property of the Location.

nielsklazenga commented 7 years ago

The listed examples are all for Darwin Core terms. Let's just use the Darwin Core definitions, which will use 'Location' (even though I'd personally prefer all of Ben's formulations). These are all properties of Location, so of course we're talking about the (Dublin Core, by the way) class.

Elsewhere, while phonetically I prefer 'locality', I think semantically 'location' might be better, referring to the exact place the Event occurred, while 'locality' might rather refer to a named locality.