1 Reply by BobS

  • BobS
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 27-06-2006
  • Posts: 40

Re: Administrative areas

It can be very useful to unambiguously select records from a particular administrative area/vice-county.  Currently in Recorder there are two types of record locations: 1) what used to be called sites and are now called locations and 2) places like 'Along the side of the A123' which are now entered in the free text 'Location name' field.  Administrative areas can be attached to locations and I assume it should be possible to list records for particular admin areas.  But there is currently no way of attaching an admin area to a record if the location has been entered using the Location name field (because the event and sample tables don't include the field) and consequently no direct way of reporting on all records from an admin area.

If people are using GIS it could be argued that it doesn't matter, but because of the frequent imprecision of grid references it is usually the case that some of the dots fall outside the polygon. Without having a direct link to an admin area field there doesn't appear to be any way of ensuring all records are selected.

There would seem to be a straightforward solution - add an admin area field to the sample table.  Is there likely to be any problem with incorporating this feature?

Bob Saville
Lothian Wildlife Information Centre Coordinator

2 Reply by Darwyn Sumner (LERC)

  • Darwyn Sumner (LERC)
  • Veteran
  • Offline
  • Registered: 07-06-2006
  • Posts: 176

Re: Administrative areas

I'm working on a different approach to this, Bob.
I've got all my Locations arranged hierarchically based upon the administrative regions here. So within my area I have Districts then Parishes (just the two tiers). I believe other LRCs use the same arrangement.
This means I can search that hierarchy using a bit of xml coding. Mike Weideli has such a thing; what it does is pick up the identifier for the Location that is currently selected and recurses through all Locations below it in the hierarchy, making a temporary table of all the Location identifiers. That table can then be used to pull out all the related records.
So far I've only used the technique to pick up measurements related to Locations of a particular habitat designation (required for our Local Development Framework statistics) and have yet to do a similar one to pick up taxa of specific statuses but the principle should be the same.

The other way of doing it is by bunging your administrative boundaries into Recorder's map, link the map objects to Locations (that way they get names you can select) and then run a Report Wizard of Taxon Records against "Restrict to one or more Polygons" which will use geospatial rules to pick out all your taxa. As a recording scheme organiser I use this a lot on Vice Counties.

3 Reply by BobS

  • BobS
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 27-06-2006
  • Posts: 40

Re: Administrative areas

Thanks for your reply, Darwyn

But, if I'm understanding you correctly, it doesn't answer the issue.  I agree that if all records were input using Locations then your suggestions would work fine but at least half of the records we store use only the Location Name field which is a simple text field that isn't linked to anything.  Because of this lack of linkage I can't see any way of assigning a record to an admin area other than having an extra field that is specific for the purpose.

Cheers

Bob

4 Reply by Darwyn Sumner (LERC)

  • Darwyn Sumner (LERC)
  • Veteran
  • Offline
  • Registered: 07-06-2006
  • Posts: 176

Re: Administrative areas

I've just talked to Bob and I'm afraid no solutions occur to us.  Use the Records card and the Admin Area(s) field is greyed out and can only be completed if a real Location is chosen, it should be possible to specify an Admin area without doing that.

5 Reply by johnvanbreda

  • johnvanbreda
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • From: UK
  • Registered: 27-04-2006
  • Posts: 1,237

Re: Administrative areas

The database model does not currently allow an administrative area to link directly to a sample, only via a location. The requirement to link admin areas directly to samples has also come up recently in discussions with users of the Collections Module, as for many records you may be aware of just the country or county for example, and have no further information. This is frequently the case with the field data associated with specimens.

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

johnvanbreda's Website

6 Reply by Graham French

  • Graham French
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 23-05-2006
  • Posts: 430

Re: Administrative areas

Bob

The ability to extract all records according to vice-counties is a very important pre-requisite to the day to day running of a national recording scheme, such as the Dragonfly Recording Network. Restricting the Report wizard to VC boundaries doesn't work due to problems with the size of the resulting SQL query (at least in recorder 2002, this may have been fixed in Recorder 6) and the DRN doesn't have access to GIS software.

Instead I link all the locations in the location name field of the SAMPLE and SURVEY_EVENT table with their appropriate vice-county in the LOCATION table (these are added automatically when using the excel import add-in). As long as you know the location_key of the VC and VC number (both found within the Location table) and the VC number for each of the locations in the location name field, then these can be linked together by running update queries in Access on the location_key field in the SAMPLE and SURVEY_EVENT table. This does change what appears in the Observational hierarchy (VC names instead of location names) but as I rarely use the Recorder's "front end" this doesn't matter.

Could a similar thing be done linking your locations to the appropriate administrative area / vice-counties?

Graham

Graham French's Website

7 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
  • Digital Development Manager
  • Offline
  • From: Field Studies Council
  • Registered: 26-03-2006
  • Posts: 906

Re: Administrative areas

If we are extracting records by vice-county, we simply import the polygons into the map and report on that. Recorder 6 handles this sort of reporting well. It's not ideal as some records with low resolution or grid references out to sea fall outside of the polygon (unless you use the sea boundaries), but with a little care most records can be extracted pretty accurately.

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

charlesroper's Website

8 Reply by BobS

  • BobS
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 27-06-2006
  • Posts: 40

Re: Administrative areas

Thanks Charles

You hit the nail on the head - using polygons to select records will capture most records but there will almost always be some that are missed (and who knows, they could be the most important ones!).  That's why I am trying to put in place a system that captures all records for a particular area.

Cheers

Bob

9 Reply by BobS

  • BobS
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 27-06-2006
  • Posts: 40

Re: Administrative areas

Thanks Graham

Yes, that works - consider every vice-county as a Location and make every 'genuine' Location into a sub-site of the vice-county, then for every record made outside genuine Locations assign the vice-county as the Location and enter the name of where the record was made in the Location_name field.

It works, but seems a bit convoluted - would you prefer it if Recorder had the capability of storing admin areas directly in Samples?

Cheers

Bob

10 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
  • Digital Development Manager
  • Offline
  • From: Field Studies Council
  • Registered: 26-03-2006
  • Posts: 906

Re: Administrative areas

Judging by the messages here, the requirement is to be able to reliably pull out all records based on one or more vice-counties. This would require that every record (every sample) in the Recorder database have a vice-county associated with it; i.e. it would have to be a mandatory field otherwise it would be no more reliable than using present methods. If an association between samples and admin areas - actually, vice-counties -  were to be enforced, then every existing sample in the database must also be assigned a vice-county. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished. Associating just one vice-county with a sample is not sufficient, as sample areas could well fall across boundaries; therefore, the ability to associate many vice-counties with each sample would be needed.

Another solution might be to enforce the entry of at least one vice-county for a location?

We have the two vice-counties of East and West Sussex as our two top-level locations, and store - or aim to at least - everything else below either of these two.

Charles

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

charlesroper's Website