Curious about uses of the distinct values directory - are you grateful it exists?

Yes. I have used them in many contexts since the time they were generated. The foremost has been to help GBIF to produce controlled vocabularies and vocabulary lookups. A second one was to build a comprehensive countryCode from country lookup (33k+ distinct values in the country field) to incorporate into BELS to improve location matching performance. A third one was to enhance the VertNet prepublication lookups so that data publishers who chose to use “migrators” to prepare data for publication would have more standardized values than otherwise. Finally, and most recently, we used the combination of vocabularies for lifeStage, sex, and preparations in an North American Ornithological Conference Workshop to try to reach a community consensus on the concepts for these three vocabularies for birds and the mapping of values found in these fields to the chosen concepts. This latter work is in the process of being reconciled with the vocabularies in the GBIF vocabulary server.

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