Notes From Nature Talk

Elevation / Longitude

  • Rolli by Rolli

    Hey,

    is it helpful to catch the elevation and latitude/longitude from the wikipedia-entry of a location,
    is one is existing?

    Posted

  • robgur by robgur scientist, admin

    Great question. There is a whole process to retrospective "georeferencing" of an object and this often requires some extra thought about capturing "error". We definitely need this information but hoped that could be a downstream step once we have labels all captured... we have ideas to build that right into Notes from Nature (the whole post-transcribing georeferencing) but for now the goal was to just capture the labels.

    Posted

  • Rolli by Rolli

    Ok,

    is this the same for 'County' and 'State', which is easy findable in wikipedia,
    if there was only a Location and a Country given on the label?

    Posted

  • robgur by robgur scientist, admin in response to Rolli's comment.

    Yes, I think so. Georeferencing has a whole "best practice" aspect and one thing we'd like to do is capture how "imprecise" a locality might be --- so if we only have a State, we want the center of that state plus an error measurement that is basically the "state area" --- that basically says "this record could have come from anywhere in this polygon the defines this geopolitical boundary". We hope that folks involved in Notes from Nature want to also get involved in georeferencing but we all decided first things first --- lets get this stuff digital and then we can do the workflows for georeferencing next and actually have some tools built to make that better/easier. But it is really important.

    Posted

  • ghewson by ghewson in response to robgur's comment.

    So you're saying that if information is missing, we should leave the field blank for now?

    Posted

  • okopho by okopho in response to ghewson's comment.

    This is a good question: I'd also like to get some clarification on this.

    I'm starting to wonder whether attempting to fill in the blanks is a good idea. One example that comes up quite often is where the location and state are given, but the county is missing. Now, if there is only one location in the state with the given name, then filling in the county adds no value (i.e. it's redundant information). On the other hand, if there are several locations with the same name, but in different counties, then attempting to fill in the county could actually be wrong - because there may not be enough information to decide which one it should be.

    All in all, I think I'm coming to the conclusion that sticking to accurate, verbatim transcriptions is the way to go. If the labels are incomplete, then the blanks are part of the data, and should also be faithfully recorded.

    Posted