Need consensus to deprecate HC term 'assessed quality of taxonomic identification'

[pzermoglio]

The term assessed quality of taxonomic identification has current definition in HC:

‘How confident is the assessor in the quality of identifications on a scale from 1 (not confident) to 5 (fully confident).’

It has been suggested that possible matches for this term could be identificationQuality (new) or dwc:identificationQualifier.

In the first round of review discussions we have arrived to the conclusion that the term, as proposed originally for HC, should be deprecated. Explanation as follows:

1. Building a new term, eg identificationQuality, with a scale from 1 to 5 (or any scale for that matter) is utterly arbitrary. Most surveys have their own criteria, but those criteria aren't necessarily consistent across all surveys.

2. Using dwc:identificationQualifier presents some interesting considerations: This term is not in the Event Core, would have to be included in the HC extension. This would not be a problem per se, we could borrow it for the extension, as long as its definition is what we actually mean. This term in DwC as currently defined is supposed to hold:

   > A brief phrase or a standard term ("cf.", "aff.") to express the determiner's doubts about the Identification.

   Note that:

   • this is a term within the Identification class, which assumes there are identifications associated in the record. For our extension, we could think that if there is a taxonomic scope or taxa not found or any of those terms declared, for example, there were identifications made to determine which critter was found or not. So we would have an implicit Identification. Now it would become a very grey area if we did not have any identifications -explicit or implicit, and we should probably not be using this term then.
   • "brief phrase" is pretty open to people putting any sorts of comments.
   • "cf.", "aff." etc have specific meanings in taxonomic determination. See eg this publication. Some of those are accepted within the codes, specifically the botanical code, but some others are 'open nomenclature', with variable use. Plus those qualifiers are accompanied by the respective taxon names. See issue #244 in the DwC repo for discussion of usage. Importantly, the qualifiers are not included if we are "certain" of the identification, but only where there is doubt. In this sense, it would defeat the purpose of assessing the quality of an overall survey. And, even if we could, we probably would not want people to list values for every taxon included in the survey in a single field.

So long story short, if anyone disagrees with deprecating the HC assessed quality of taxonomic identification and feels that this terms absolutely needs to be included, we are here soliciting suggestions on how to propose the term in a way that would actually make it useful.

[robgur]

No arguments here

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 6:54 PM Paula Zermoglio notifications@github.com wrote:

The term assessed quality of taxonomic identification has current definition in HC:

‘How confident is the assessor in the quality of identifications on a scale from 1 (not confident) to 5 (fully confident).’

It has been suggested that possible matches for this term could be identificationQuality (new) or dwc:identificationQualifier.

In the first round of review discussions we have arrived to the conclusion that the term, as proposed originally for HC, should be deprecated. Explanation as follows:

1.

Building a new term, eg identificationQuality, with a scale from 1 to 5 (or any scale for that matter) is utterly arbitrary. Most surveys have their own criteria, but those criteria aren't necessarily consistent across all surveys. 2.

Using dwc:identificationQualifier presents some interesting considerations: This term is not in the Event Core, would have to be included in the HC extension. This would not be a problem per se, we could borrow it for the extension, as long as its definition is what we actually mean. This term in DwC as currently defined is supposed to hold:

> A brief phrase or a standard term ("cf.", "aff.") to express the determiner's doubts about the Identification.

Note that:

• this is a term within the Identification class, which assumes there are identifications associated in the record. For our extension, we could think that if there is a taxonomic scope or taxa not found or any of those terms declared, for example, there were identifications made to determine which critter was found or not. So we would have an implicit Identification. Now it would become a very grey area if we did not have any identifications -explicit or implicit, and we should probably not be using this term then.
  • "brief phrase" is pretty open to people putting any sorts of comments.
  • "cf.", "aff." etc have specific meanings in taxonomic determination. See eg this publication https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/28986/Sigovini_2016%20ON_%20w%20appendix.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Some of those are accepted within the codes, specifically the botanical code, but some others are 'open nomenclature', with variable use. Plus those qualifiers are accompanied by the respective taxon names. See issue #244 in the DwC repo https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/244 for discussion of usage. Importantly, the qualifiers are not included if we are "certain" of the identification, but only where there is doubt. In this sense, it would defeat the purpose of assessing the quality of an overall survey. And, even if we could, we probably would not want people to list values for every taxon included in the survey in a single field.

So long story short, if anyone disagrees with deprecating the HC assessed quality of taxonomic identification and feels that this terms absolutely needs to be included, we are here soliciting suggestions on how to propose the term in a way that would actually make it useful.

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[tucotuco]

Please!

[yanisica]

Comments from Peter Brenton:

identificationQuality: "This is really a confidence level indicator which is most accurately applied as a qualifier on individual observations. Extrapolating this to event and/or dataset level would requiure rules for consistent interpretation. In the PPSR-Core it is a property at the dataset level and the definitional rule is that it is: "A generalised category that best reflects the least accurate record in the dataset for species identification." and it is graded categorically as High, Medium, Low, Not applicable."

See more info here on HC - PPSR mapping here

[tucotuco]

I think we can easily reject the dwc:identificationQualifier option. The usage that Peter mentions would have to be an HC term. As such, it could apply to any Event, not just the root Event, which applies to the entire the data set. So far we have two "votes" to deprecate the term, but a consensus decision has to be made, or we include the new term and let the public review sort it out.

[tucotuco]

Not included in Extension proposal.