Issue 17506
Merge french oversea departments into mainland country code France (FR)
17506
Reporter: mdoering
Assignee: thirsch
Type: Improvement
Summary: Merge french oversea departments into mainland country code France (FR)
Priority: Major
Resolution: Fixed
Status: Closed
Created: 2015-03-17 15:26:06.1
Updated: 2018-05-31 16:43:11.445
Resolved: 2018-05-31 16:43:11.417
Description: France consists of a few oversea departments which are considered to be France but have their own country ISO code. We treat them therefore in our country pages as separate countries, but in our occurrence processing the geolookup returns France for all those places. This leads to wrong interpretation issue flags (country mismatch).
Martinique example missing from respective country page:
http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1019742559
http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1019742559/verbatim
http://www.gbif.org/country/MQ
We have asked the French GBIF node (Sophie Pamerlon) if they prefer to see separate country pages or to merge all data on the country page for France. They prefer to merge the following ISO codes into France:
- French Guyana
- Guadeloupe
- Martinique
- Mayotte
- Réunion
For comparison we treat British oversea territories as distinct countries, for example Bermuda and Guernsey. But these seem to be more independent as the french ones:
http://www.gbif.org/country/BM/summary
http://www.gbif.org/country/GG/summary
{quote}
After discussing the matter of overseas occurrences with the GBIF France team, we reached the conclusion that it would be better to use only one page for all of the French records, overseas records included. It would be the more logical thing to do, given that the five overseas "départements" (French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Réunion) are strongly linked to the mainland. Could you please remove the overseas country pages (but only those cited above, other French territories like French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, New Caledonia or Saint Pierre and Miquelon being much more independent), and repatriate the data under the country page for France?
{quote}
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Author: mdoering@gbif.org
Comment: [~thirsch@gbif.org], does that cause troubles with GBIF reporting elsewhere, e.g. CBD?
Created: 2015-03-17 15:40:53.752
Updated: 2015-03-17 15:40:53.752
Author: thirsch@gbif.org
Comment: I think this is ok but need to look at it in more detail to make sure we are not creating inconsistencies or infringing political sensitivities elsewhere. Let me consult with some colleagues and I will post a further comment here with final decision.
Created: 2015-03-17 15:59:05.046
Updated: 2015-03-17 16:00:00.865
Author: ahahn@gbif.org
Created: 2015-09-22 14:49:52.649
Updated: 2015-09-22 14:49:52.649
The treatment of French overseas Départements as "France" is based on the political understanding and the perspective of the country node. However, it touches on some other points that need consideration:
- inconsistent use of ISO codes on our web pages: we do not provide similar lumping for other countries, and in some cases would be very reluctant to do so, as it may have severe political repercussions
- user expectation: does a user searching for occurrences in France expect to find records from non-European locations included? Are they sufficiently alerted to the fact that this is the case, to be easily able to exclude such records again? Or should those records not be contained in the first place, at least not under the "data about" aspect?
- flagging of country-coordinate mismatches / original records: ISO 3166-1 covers "countries, territories and islands". The purpose of the mapping of occurrence records against the ISO standard is not to represent political, but geographical location. How is the location represented in the original records? If it is showing as "country=France", this would need to be detected at interpretation time (if country=France, then also consider the following polygons in the coordinate check:...). Mixing concepts by then also mapping it to an ISO code of 'FR' seems wrong though; if it falls into the ISO concept of French Guiana, this should be the ISO code it gets/keeps (GF), and which should ideally be supplied by the source. How to then later merge/represent on maps is a different issue. [based on assumptions - still need to verify with OM what the actual indexing logic is here at present]
- for a user coming through http://www.gbif.org/country, it would not be transparent where to look for information on French Guiana et al if those territories were to be removed from the list and from representation on individual pages as "countries, territories and islands" as sketched in the issue description - they should not be removed from here. However, the current duplication adds confusion, especially as the territory is not handled identically in both places: at present, records in e.g. French Guiana appear to be included in both maps (FR and FG), but state location in France in one case and French Guiana in the other. Additional inconsistency: map inclusion/exclusion of marine territorial waters (see e.g. French Guiana at http://www.gbif.org/country/FR/about and http://www.gbif.org/country/GF/about)
This still needs further discussion (also with GBIF France) and decision, but I would suggest to revoke the inclusion of territories at least for the "data about" tab for the sake of web site consistency and user expectation adherence, and think about different solutions for giving GBIF France full political visibility or allow pre-defined downloads of "all data relating to political France", if this is a requirement.