Use restricted vocabulary when possible

[BobSimons]

Based on the 2021-05-18 release of the occurrence.csv file, I think that several of the fields would benefit from using a restricted vocabulary or at least a list of preferred terms that would be used whenever possible. For example,

• The occurrenceStatus field includes the values "P", "Presence", "presence", "Present", "present", and "Presente".
• The language field includes the values "En", "en", "eng", "Engish", and "English". Perhaps you could standardize on one of the ISO schemes for language codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_code
• The taxonomicStatus field includes the values "Accepted", "accepted", "Aceptado", and "aceptado" among others.

Generating a list of the current values in these fields (with SELECT DISTINCT), and then converting to a restricted vocabulary when possible, seems not too difficult given that the data is in a relational database.

Best wishes.

[ymgan]

Hi Bob, what you suggested definitely sounds useful.

I just wanted to document some information that I found useful here for future reference.

GitHub issue related to this: https://github.com/gbif/pipelines/issues/268

The list of values for occurrenceStatus that is currently being interpreted into vocabulary in GBIF: https://github.com/gbif/parsers/blob/master/src/main/resources/dictionaries/parse/occurrence_status.tsv