CJ -- Darwin Core 1.2 and the Paleo extensions should fairly well cover our collections' needs. However, I want to make certain that you are aware of a couple of major field format problems that we ran into with the current release, and which we hope will be remedied in the next release:

The first is the apparent inability of the current DiGIR query mechanism to output latitude and longitude in numeric (rather than text) form. This means that portals such as GBIF and Berkeley Mapper are unable to produce distribution maps for our data.

The second is the need for the collection date to be output as separate numeric year, month, and day fields, rather than as a single text field. So far, none of the queries that we've received from y'all has succeeded in doing this, with the result that our search listings on sites such as GBIF lack collection dates.

Please let me know if you need additional information.

Melissa

Melissa,

I was recently made aware of both of the issues you bring up about dates and lat / long fields. Unfortunately, neither of these issues will be solved by Specify 5.2.

The problem with latitude and longitude data is that it would be output in the format specified by the user preference. This may or may not be in decimal format and so it is not done. I will talk to Tim and see if there is anything we can do about this, but I am afraid it may be too late in the development process as we are trying to release in the next few days. If it is indeed too late, I will see what I can do for a work-around. It could be as simple as changing the field type in the database, I am not sure but I will look into it.

Collection date is another issue I will look into. Again, it may be too late to do anything about it for the next release. Depending on the exported format this issue may be quite simple to work around or somewhat difficult. I should have a better idea in the following days.

CJ

Tim was able to force latitude and longitudes to be exported in decimal format. I am still not sure about dates.