Investigate how to support old terms, for example out of date iso country codes, and the value of doing so

10139
Reporter: omeyn
Type: Technical
Summary: Investigate how to support old terms, for example out of date iso country codes, and the value of doing so
Priority: Minor
Status: Open
Created: 2011-11-07 15:41:02.218
Updated: 2013-12-06 13:06:07.812

Author: omeyn@gbif.org
Created: 2011-11-07 15:41:24.623
Updated: 2011-11-07 15:41:24.623
        
from markus

A good question. What is the purpose for having old codes?
we might want to map old country codes to new ones (even if there are multiple) as in most cases when we want to have a controlled vocabulary we want it for a reason and not have other old terms. In that case its an alternative term handled by the vocabularies already.
we still want to deal with old and new versions of the vocabulary at the same time? I cant think of an example for this use case, but if it exists, that leads us to the versioning problem of vocabularies. Flagging old entries as "old" in the latest instance of e.g the country list does not seem to help
Anything else that Ive forgotten?

The rank vocabulary for example maps old, unsupported ranks to new ones already.
And so does the taxonomic and nomenclatural status vocab:
http://rs.gbif.org/vocabulary/gbif/rank.xml
http://rs.gbif.org/vocabulary/gbif/taxonomic_status.xml
    

Author: omeyn@gbif.org
Created: 2011-11-07 15:41:37.368
Updated: 2011-11-07 15:41:37.368
        
from lars

Old codes will certainly be needed for our processing. I guess not every dataset will be updated with new codes when they become available. So that's my usecase for having historical things in there. And we need some way of saying that this code shouldn't be used anymore for providing feedback.
    

Author: omeyn@gbif.org
Created: 2011-11-07 15:41:51.581
Updated: 2011-11-07 15:41:51.581
        
from markus

sure we will have to deal with old codes. The question is what we intend to do with them. I would think in most cases map them to current codes or nothing at all, right? thats what I meant above. Agree it would also be nice to automatically inform them that those codes are not up to date anymore. Is it important therefore to know that they once were? Or isnt it god enough that they are not current and we might even know what the current one/s is/are?
    

Author: omeyn@gbif.org
Created: 2011-11-07 15:42:05.263
Updated: 2011-11-07 15:42:05.263
        
from lars

We might not be able to always make that distinction. There might not be a clear "correct" new code without looking at more context.
Haven't looked at it in detail though but if a country splits in two and we get two new codes that might be a problem.
    

Author: omeyn@gbif.org
Created: 2011-11-07 15:42:14.567
Updated: 2011-11-07 15:42:14.567
        
from markus

Sure, the old code would map to 2 in that (most likely) case. But thats what our vocabs would do, so I cant see any problem - apart from us writing logic to handle these situations.