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mbohun / biolink

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Import regions #214

Closed GoogleCodeExporter closed 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Import Regions
2.
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I would expect the info to go into Region explorer instead it goes into Site 
Explorer

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
3.0 windows 7

Please provide any additional information below.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by m...@skye6.fsnet.co.uk on 4 Feb 2014 at 2:53

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Mike,

Taxon Distribution Regions are a distinct concept from Material (specimen) 
"Political Regions". The import facility does not currently provide a mechanism 
for importing "Distribution Regions". There are actually two issues here. 

1) There is currently no way to add Regions to the region explorer when it is 
empty (a defect introduced with Version 3.0 of BioLink)
2) There is no way to import "Distribution Regions" from an external source.

The other slight confounding factor is that regions (both Political and 
Distribution) are hierarchical, and have no fixed schema - meaning regions can 
be created arbitrarily without adhering to some overall structure (such as 
Country/State/Province/County etc). This allows the flexibility of creating 
custom geographical regions based on what ever criteria you like, but poses 
problems during the importing of data. Because Political regions are typically 
more structured (along the lines of Darwin Core, say) the import tool makes 
provision for creating a hierarchy based on common political "levels", but this 
is not mandated, and only added as a convenience. Distribution Regions, 
however, have typically been based on regions as defined in various map layer 
files, for example, and may not coincide with political boundaries at all, so I 
think that is why the two concepts of "Region" exist.

I will create two new issues in the issue register reflecting the above, and 
will close this one.

Cheers, David.

Original comment by david.ba...@gmail.com on 5 Feb 2014 at 5:45

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago

Original comment by david.ba...@gmail.com on 19 Feb 2014 at 1:00