Taxonomic Coverage page mockup

[Matthew Brooke]

Matt:

A few questions/discussion points regarding your Taxonomic Coverage page 
mockup comments:

1) "Not all taxa use the ranks listed in your table..."

a) Perumal and I talked about the approach you describe before coming up 
with the current one, but the problem with a 2-col table is that every 
taxonomic definition would need a separate table (and probably a 
separate dialog), whereas perumal's mockup allows all the data to be 
presented clearly and concisely in one place. Even if we did a 2 or 
3-col table, wouldn't we still need some kind of "summary" table like 
this one (compare with party dialog & party table) ? We figured that the 
clearest way to show the info was in this form, rather than a tree etc, 
and it also allows all entries to be editable in place (except common 
name - see below).

Would either of the following work?

i)  make the ranks (column headings) editable, but still use this 
layout? If a single dataset contains different taxon ranking methods for 
different entries (for example, if some rankings include Division, but 
others include Phylum), then we may still need to go to multiple tables, 
but would this be a much less-common scenario?

ii)  represent the info in tabular form without using col headings - so 
for each entry we could indicate the rank alongside the name; eg:

  ... | Family: Flagellariaceae | Genus: Flagellaria | Species: 
guineensis | ...etc

("|" pipes used to show where column dividers fall)


b) An additional comment:

"Common Names" can apply to any level of the taxonomy (I think?), but we 
obviously have a problem representing that in the table as shown (unless 
each entry has 2 lines?), so we resorted to showing an abbreviated 
"surrogate" list in the last column (like we do for party etc), which 
could be clicked/edited in some way to pop up a dialog showing which 
common names correspond to which ranks. However, a drop-down list (as 
shown in the mockup) probably isn't appropriate for the "common names" 
column - since this implies a choice to be made by the user.



2) "When people use coded values in their metadata..."

The middle part of perumal's mockup shows a section entitled "Import 
Taxon Data" which, if I understand correctly, is where a user would be 
able to provide the taxon information from existing (or 
yet-to-be-imported) data tables, as you describe

M


Matt Jones wrote:

> Hi Perumal,
>
> That is a nice mockup.  A couple of issues come to mind.
>
> 1) Not all taxa use the ranks listed in your table.  For example, in 
> plants they use 'Division' in place of 'Phylum'.  There are many of 
> these variants, which is why in eml the system allows the user to 
> specifiy both the rank and the name (rather than fixing the rank to a 
> predefined set). So I would prefer a two column table containing 
> "Rank" and "Name" for the most precise rank provided by the user, 
> which might have values like "Species" and "Bosmina longistrosis".  
> You could also list common names in this table if desired as a third 
> column.
>
> 2) When people use coded values in their metadata (ie enumerations) 
> they'll be defining the codes in terms of taxon names, and that same 
> process can be used to fill out the taxon coverage info.  So that is 
> another way through which they might provide the taxon information.
>
> Matt
>
>
> Perumal Sambasivam wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> For the taxonomic coverage page, I have a preliminary mockup (pls see 
>> the attachment).
>>
>> It consists of -
>> 1. A list for entering taxon names. The list consists of 7 columns for
>> each level of classification. A user could add a species name and 
>> specify
>> all the names in the hierarchy. There is also a column for the common
>> names.  It will be a dropdown box of all the common names of the whole
>> hierarchy. If user wants to add a common name, a dialog box is presented
>> with a customlist for each level and the user can add a common name 
>> to any
>> level.
>>
>> 2. The user can import the taxon data from a particular table. The 
>> column values will be read, an ITIS lookup will be done for each 
>> value to determine its level and values in the hierarchy above it and 
>> the values will be added to the above list. The user can edit any 
>> value, if needed.
>>
>> 3. The user can also optionally specify a new Classification system 
>> and identifier.
>>
>>
>> Please let me know your comments/feedback on this.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> -Perumal
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Perumal Sambasivam
>>
>> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
>> University of California Santa Barbara
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>