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Multiple Counties - Darwin Core Hour Input Form 2/14/2017 11:47:46 #39

Open iDigBioBot opened 7 years ago

iDigBioBot commented 7 years ago

A user submitted this information via the Darwin Core Hour webform: Timestamp: 2/14/2017 11:47:46 Please provide a topic of interest: dwc:county What do I do if I have multiple counties in the county field in my database? How do I use the dwc:county field in this case? Is there another (better) way to convey this information? Are you capable of and interested in participating: No Who else would you recommend to participate in the presentation: DwC standards team (on github) and software developers from Specify, Symbiota, Arctos, etc. What resources can you point to: Database searches at iDigBio, VertNet, GBIF - to show community what the data in the county field looks like. Your name: Deborah Paul Your email: dpaul@fsu.edu

tucotuco commented 7 years ago

This is a very interesting issue. The most common way multiple counties are encoded in the county field is to separate them with a comma ','. Other less common options found are ';', ' or ', and sometimes ' and '. Just because it is done does not mean it is a good idea, however. The Darwin Core definition of county

The full, unabbreviated name of the next smaller administrative region than stateProvince (county, shire, department, etc.) in which the Location occurs.

is silent about multiple counties except that it uses the singular administrative region. The county field does not have a recommendation to use a controlled vocabulary either, so I guess it would be difficult to blame people for putting whatever they want in there as long as it isn't abbreviated.

To be strict to the intention of the county field, that is, to capture a standard full name for one administrative level below that in stateProvince, multiple counties should not go there. If they don't, they would be perfectly welcome in the locality field, appended to whatever else was already there. This is what I would recommend.

Note that there can be ambiguity if the county is populated with multiple values. It could be that the location was in one or another of the counties listed, or it could be that it was in both (and therefore necessarily along their shared border). Sometimes this ambiguity is resolved by further information in the locality, verbatimLocality, or locationRemarks fields, but is not resolvable by the county value alone.