GarryJolleyRogers - Wed Nov 25 2009 - Version 1.14
Parent topic: ClosedTopicSchemaDiscussionSDD09

GeographicalRestrictions

It is often the case in descriptions of widespread taxa that it's useful to place geographic restrictions on particular codes.

Example: Taxon A has red eyes in North America and blue eyes in Europe.

-- Main.KevinThiele - 24 Oct 2003

Ah, ha! So that is the explanation of why Salmo salar has one red eye and one blue eye!

-- Main.BobMorris - 22 Nov 2003

In SDD schema 0.9 beta 27 I have changed the abstract DescriptionBaseType (from which Coded and NaturalLanguageDescriptions are derived) to include a new GeographicalScope element with text content.

The question is: shall we add a new Geography section to resources, and make GeographicalScope a collection of reference pointers to that? That would be the most consistent treatment, unless we say we only want to deal with this problem as an aside. What do you think?

BTW, a plant pathogenic fungus may look different depending on the host plant as well...

-- Gregor Hagedorn - 24 Nov 2003

If a section in Resources is consistent, then we should go with that. I suggest that it be called CodingRestrictions rather than Geography to accommodate the host plant case

-- Main.KevinThiele - 26 Nov 2003

I am adding Resources/Geography/Location. Resources/Locations/Location seemed rather vague. Any better ideas?

That means I will change the structure of the geographical scope in the project definition as well!

I basically agree that there are other CodingRestrictions. However, this would make it impossible to ever truly use a resource services, since no resource service would mix plant names and geographical locations. For the moment I have added GeographicalScope as collection or resource references, and "__OtherScopes" string as a reminder that there may be more (all underscore elements are to be ignored for testing purposes, they are only present for the purpose of discussion).

-- Gregor Hagedorn - 26 Nov 2003

The changes discussed above are already in the final 0.9 release. However, it just occurs me that the stored keys may also have similar scope restrictions. If nobody objects, I will put this into the 0.91 preliminary version.

-- Gregor Hagedorn - 10 Feb 2004

-- Gregor Hagedorn - 28 May 2004