Closed tomsaleeba closed 4 years ago
This is more of a product question than a technical one, so please address this at https://forum.inaturalist.org/. That said, keep in mind that annotations are explicitly not specific to individual projects or efforts. They are meant to be universal across the site. If your project / client has specific needs, it would be better to stick with observation fields, or to store whatever additional data you need within your own app.
We're exploring how to support multi-valued questions in our app (that is a client to iNat) and have come up with all the options you'd expect for obs fields. Then we noticed that annotations already have this support built in and they get other benefits like the histogram charts and community voting. So we'd like to use annotations over obs fields where possible.
We'd like to explore two things:
We understand that adding new annotations requires more than just entering them into the /controlled_terms web UI but felt we needed to ask the question.
We can see that including annotations in an export (here, here) and allowing filtering by annotations (here, here) are both on your radar, which is good news.
Here's a rough comparison of ours vs yours for plant phenology values. Some discussion about how our terms map, or don't, to your fruiting might be required.
We can see there's been a change to budding. This aligns with our term as our vegetative covers leaf budding; and everything that is not reproductive.
Proposed new annotations:
Landuse of the immediate area
Surface coarse fragments present
Evidence of disturbance and threats in the immediate area
We're dealing with Orchids but expect that these annotations would apply to at least plants but perhaps more of the taxa tree.