Hi Charlie,

I think that the the determination type has to be one of those currently supported by R6. They are:

Correct
Considered Correct
Incorrect
Considered Incorrect
Requires Confirmation
Unconfirmed

The first two corresponds to a verification status of 'passed verification'; the next three correspond to a verification status of 'failed/pending verification' and the last one corresponds to a verification status of 'not verified'.

Adding new determination types like 'probably correct' would require a change to the R6 software I think. However, the determination types you mention are all pretty comfortably accommodated in those above (probably correct = considered correct; known correct = correct; probably incorrect = considered incorrect; known incorrect = incorrect).

But your other point is that if the verifier changes the taxon, then two new R6 determination records should be added: the first to say that the current taxon is 'incorrect' or 'considered incorrect' and another with the new taxon and a determination type of 'correct' or 'considered correct'. I'm not convinced that two determination records are necessary since the change in taxon name indicates, implicitly, that the taxon name on superseded determinations is considered to be wrong. However, if you wanted to add two determinations, you could post-process the files that you get back from your verifiers, adding two lines for each record where the taxon has been changed: the first to update the determination type of the current taxon to 'incorrect' or 'considered incorrect' and the second to do the taxon update. (I'm not sure if these would have to go into separate CSV files and run in two batch updates or whether it would all work in one - Mike will have a view on that I'm sure.)

Post processing spreadsheets passed back from verifiers before running them through the batch update process is vital because it is quite a complicated process and, however much you explain it, different people will update the records in different ways. So adding something like the above into your workflow for using these batch update scripts for verification should not be a great burden.

Rich

You are right about the determinations - the ones I listed are sytem supplied (since 6.13) but you can add your own via term lists apparently.

Your example also illustrates your point nicely. Using a single determination the verifier's comment would have to be qualified by adding something like 'Originally recorded as Large Tortoiseshell'. This would be quite fiddly and also entails modifying the verifier's comment, which you might not consider desirable - so I take your point.

I've just looked at the batch update script in order to modify it to deal with missing TOKs and I can see that it would cope okay with adding more than one new determination to a single taxon occurrence, so post-processing to add two determinations in these cases would be possible.