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Topic: Upload format for vice-county

I'm looking for a way to include the vice-county in Darwin Core format for export to the NBN.  This isn't one of the attributes mentioned in the guidance notes. DarwinCore has a County field and also higherGeographyID that might be usable:

County: The name of the next smaller administrative region than country (state, province, canton, department, region, etc.) in which the Location occurs.
Notes: The name of this term is not meant to limit its content to the names of counties. The term name is a legacy from the original version of the Darwin Core. Despite the term's name, the content has always been intended to include the name of a second-level administrative subdivision of a country.

Higher Geography ID: An identifier for the geographic region within which the Location occurred. Recommended best practice is to use an persistent identifier from a controlled vocabulary such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.

Example(s): "TGN: 1002002" for Prov. Tierra del Fuego, Argentina

A drawback of County is that it appears to be used for the name rather than code, which is not ideal for specifying vice-county (given the inconsistencies of VC naming)

Using higherGeographyID for the VC code e.g. "VC100", is a slight abuse of the field, but seems within the spirit of its intended usage.

If I used these to store the vice-county name and code might the Atlas pick them up, rather than inferring the county from the grid-reference?

I'd prefer that, where available, vice-county was taken from the source record rather than inferred (particularly for records from squares that span boundaries so that the county to infer would be ambiguous).  It's an important detail, both for localising records from grid-squares that span boundaries and for administration of records (allocation of responsibility between county recorders).

Tom Humphrey
Database Officer,
Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI)

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Re: Upload format for vice-county

Even with the vice county name and code stored against the record, the Atlas will still infer the vice county from the grid reference and use that inferred value in the searches.

On option for including vice country is to use the dynamicProperties term (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/dynamicProperties), if you didn't want to use the higherGeographyID term.

3 (edited by charliebarnes 05-03-2018 09:53:07)

Re: Upload format for vice-county

(I'm curious about the accuracy of inferred vcs - I've followed this up separately with a new topic https://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php … 291#p28291 )

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership