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archaeological contexts - Darwin Core Hour Input Form 5/23/2019 12:02:52 #137

Open iDigBioBot opened 5 years ago

iDigBioBot commented 5 years ago

A user submitted this information via the Darwin Core Hour webform: Timestamp: 5/23/2019 12:02:52 Please provide a topic of interest: geologicalContext: links to OpenContext which would put zooarchaeological sites and subsites at the same level as geological context. Is this correct? Are you capable of and interested in participating: Yes Who else would you recommend to participate in the presentation: Kitty Emery What resources can you point to: Your name: Meghan Balk Your email: meghan.balk@gmail.com Your GitHub username: @megbalk

tucotuco commented 5 years ago

Yes, geologicalContext is the concept under which archaeological sites would be grouped. See also issue #135.

dennereed commented 5 years ago

What is the relationship between sites (on one hand) and geologicalContext and Locality on the other? Is a site closer to the concept of a locality or GeologicalContext?

tucotuco commented 5 years ago

@dennereed The GeologicalContext is more specific than the Locality. One could model the GeologicalContext as a part of the Locality that is used only in particular circumstances. The reason for having a separate Class for it is partly historical (from the Paleo extension in the pre-standard DiGIR version of Darwin Core) and partly thinking forward to GUIDs for Contexts (which happily has come to fruition with OpenContext).

dennereed commented 5 years ago

@tucotuco Interesting. I imagined Location and GeologicalContext to be separate concepts. Location being the geographic position and GeologicalContext being the stratigraphic position, and archaeological or paleontological context as its generally used as the intersection of the two. Thus a GeologicalContext such as a member or bed could have broad geographic lateral extent and two objects could share geological context at separate Locations/localities.

tucotuco commented 5 years ago

I see the GeologicalContext as an elaboration on the Locality, given that the definition says "Geological information, such as stratigraphy, that qualifies a region or place." If there is Locality information and GeologicalContext information, the combination is the very specific context at a place, just in the way @dennereed mentions (the intersection of the two). In Zooarch we are using the OpenContext identifier for the LocalityID (for example, see https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1675358261), which points to a specific context in a hierarchy of contexts that lead right up into the equivalent of geographic levels of Locality information.

meghalithic commented 5 years ago

Out of this and other discussions, I realize that a big difference is the difference between geologicalContext example and the example in the geologicalContextID. For example, as a paleontologist, I would interpret a lithostratigraphic layer as "fluvial" or "deep water". But, it seems to be different for archaeologists. So, perhaps a broad term like "geologic" isn't ideal, or the specific definitions need to be changed. I tend to interpret the separation between GeologicContext and Locality similar to @dennereed (but with the caveat that the example given in GeologicContext means something different to a paleontologist than an archaeologist).