GWG notes 8 April 2014

Summary Notes

Our meeting yesterday, in a nutshell.

Participants: Nelson Rios, Hannah Traggis, Ryan Allen, Mary Barkworth, Deb Paul

Webinars (more topics welcome)

1. GEOLocate Collaborative Georeferencing Webinar 24 April 2014, 2 - 3 pm EDT

presenter: Nelson Rios

1. Georeferencing and Symbiota (date to be decided)

Ed Gilbert, Nelson Rios, and ?

1. Georeferencing and Specify (date to be decided)

Andy Bentley, Nelson Rios, and ?

1. ?Meet with our TTT participants? A lessons learned discussion, ...?

We had a lengthy discussion about a georeferencing issue in Symbiota from Hannah - and Nelson is going to check with Ed Gilbert to see if we can answer her question definitively. Her question was about "re-georeferencing" a locality b/c they are georeferencing by taxonomic group (Macroalgal TCN). This means the same locality comes up later. She was wondering why she doesn't find the already-georeferenced locality. We wondered too. Nelson is getting together with Ed to see if it's a software or a procedural issue.

Hannah also discussed their challenge to standardize entry of a locality (for example from most general to most specific). Are there instructions (from other projects) on good ways to do this? By good, I mean instructions that genuinely result in standard transcription values for a given set of labels. It was suggested to create a standard set of labels -- with the respective transcription desired (as a model).

Also, I (Deb) brought up the http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/verbatimLocality compared to http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/locality because I'm wondering about the mapping from the locality field in Symbiota to Darwin Core. It is not "verbatimLocality" that Hannah was describing.

And, the importance of habitat was stressed -- and that when everyone is atomizing -- the locality field is not enough to get the georeference as good as it can get.

Other bits: Mary Barkworth: What would be really useful is something like duplicate discover across the network (SEINet) for locality information (plus state and county) - with perhaps a % similarity - and ability to map highly similar records that have been georeferenced. Sent this to Nelson and Ed yesterday.

And, the discussion certainly lead to (for Symbiota and Specify) the continuing need (that's about to be met, I think) for people to be able to export localities > georeference them (in GEOLocate, or wherever) > and then import them back into respective databases. Jim B. shared that Specify will have this functionality in a few months hence. (2 more updates).

Next meeting: 13 May 2014 130 EDT http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/geotrain

Your Agenda items? Locality Services Document Next project/s for us

1. georeferencing.org
2. clean up / update of gwg pages (Deb's done some)

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