Better system for parsing location levels

[RocketD0g]

I don't have a clear suggestion at the moment for solving this issue, so I'll just describe the problem:

Currently, we assign a city to each measurement. But some measurements aren't associated with cities in their originating source (e.g. several data points in the EPA system, also an issue with the DEFRA data for GB). Currently, we assign the non-city associated EPA data with its county-level, instead.

But its a larger issue for other places we add in: how do we handle places that are not associated with cities but are truly in rural sites? I suggest leaving them blank, but I know this is a bad idea! (@jflasher).

[olafveerman]

I remember having this discussion with @jflasher a couple of months ago. The city nomenclature doesn't apply to every use case. Alas, there are not a lot of sources that report strictly per city. Australia does on a lower level (Sydney East, West, etc), Chile and São Paulo as well.

Some possibilities:

• remove city and group by country (which makes it harder to group measurements quickly)
• rename city to something more generic (hard to find a name that is accurate and that people can relate to. admin_area, region, etc don't seem to cut it)
• come up with our own grouping for stations that have coordinates. It should be feasible to associate a region / province to a set of coordinates (seems like the solution with the biggest lift)