Averaging across modifiers doesn't make sense when modifiers indicate dissimilar items

ropensci / neotoma

Programmatic R interface to the Neotoma Paleoecological Database.

https://docs.ropensci.org/neotoma

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Averaging across modifiers doesn't make sense when modifiers indicate dissimilar items #200

Closed SimonGoring closed 8 years ago

SimonGoring commented 8 years ago

With water chemistry it makes no sense to average e.g, surface and bottom water.

SimonGoring commented 8 years ago

I've made a bit of progress, but I'm worried that thich changes a few things. In particular it changes the structure of the taxon.table. Not the end of the world (it adds a new column). The bigger issue is how we would represent the columns in the count table. I had initially intended to just rename the taxa, with the taxon and then the variable units, but it might make more sense to use a unique ID. Neither case works particularly well with compile_download though.

SimonGoring commented 8 years ago

This is now addressed fully through changes in several commits, but fully resolved with commit https://github.com/ropensci/neotoma/commit/6219196cff136b11b455ad51317d08237b73f347, where we provide an aliased taxon name composed of all variable modifiers. This appears to work with water chemistry.