DwC has minimumDepthInMeters and maximumDepthInMeters, and we’ve gone to some trouble to make all our locality entries for Marine Invertebrates conform to that standard.
GBIF, instead, seems to discard the min and max depth, and reports a depth and depth accuracy instead. I am sure there is some solid reason, why is it done that way?
Should we be reporting depths differently than DwC?
DwC as a data transfer standard aims to be precise in the way that information is structured and transmitted. This does not necessarily mean that it is the most intuitive way to read for data users in other contexts (like a data portal user interface), especially where they cannot be expected to read up on data standard definitions. Depth is one such example: is “minimumDepth” the lowest point under sea surface, or the lowest value (i.e. the upper location)?
The UI is attempting to limit doubt or misunderstandings for human readers where possible by adjusting the displayed information. The data stored and transmitted is still following the transfer standard, however, and there is no need to change anything in data configurations for publishing.
The ingestion mechanism will store the original values, and also evaluate them in consistency and plausibility checks (see
Occurrence issues and flags :: Technical Documentation). They are not discarded, just represented in an alternative way in the UI.
When in doubt, keep confirming to the standard, as you are doing. Interpretation and display will always be secondary, building on that.
@vijaybarve, I’m guessing “we” means LACM? Please see this record for an example of the confusion @ahahn might be thinking about.
I also note in this recent LACM dataset that some of the minDIM and maxDIM values are given to +/- 0.01 m, which seems overaccurate. Is it possible they were converted from US feet, but without the original range being entered in verbatimDepth?
Thank you @ahahn This is a very helpful explanation. We will continue to use minimumDepthInMeters and maximumDepthInMeters as we are since those are useful attributes for many of our Marine Invertebrate occurrence records.
@datafixer You are right, by we I mean LACM here.
I am working on some of the Marine Invertebrate datasets right now but not the [LACM Echinoderms](LACM Echinoderms).
The latest one I published was Invertebrate Collections made by R/V Velero III, IV, Atlantic, and Hubbs. As you have rightly pointed out we do have depth readings converted from feet or fathoms, but in most cases we do have verbatimDepth published like this.