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tdwg / esp

Earth Sciences and Paleobiology Interest Group
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dwc:locality #21

Open dennereed opened 7 years ago

dennereed commented 7 years ago

Locality has a very specific meaning in paleobiology, where study areas often have specific named or numbered localities. Does the Darwin Core concept adequately cover the paleobiological usage of the term? The example given in the Darwin Core documentation provides a text description of a specific location. What other guidelines can we offer specific to paleobiology?

dennereed commented 6 years ago

One solution to this problem is to use dwc:locality to refer to named places, and best practice is to use a name from an established gazeteer. Likewise the numbered localities used by field paleontologists would be prepended with a unique URI (or collection codes) to create a unique identifier for the locality entered into localityID

For example fossil locality DIK-1 in Dikika, Ethiopia would have a locality = https://www.geonames.org/444179, representing an area registered with geonames.org (the Afar administrative region) and then a localityID = 'nme:dik:DIK-1' a concatenation of the institution code, collection code and locality number. The advantage of this system is that the locality can be suitably vague to protect its specific location, and the locality number can link to the detailed location in the field notes but not reveal the exact location. This system would also facility geocoding because the coordinates could be acquired from the gazeteer.

hollyel commented 6 years ago

I think if you want to go with that more formalized version of locality it would need to be a newly proposed term. In our data we definitely use dwc:locality as it is defined. I think that would probably be the case for many other collections as well.

hollyel commented 6 years ago

On a somewhat separate note, the suggestion being circulated is that if information is not shared because of restrictions on sharing locality data the data provider should serve the field informationWithheld with an explanation such as “More data may be available”.