2012-01-11 NCEAS meeting¶

Participants: Mark, Aaron, Jim

To do¶

1. Select visual modeling tool to create VegBIEN ERD: using MySQLWorkbench
   • Sybase Powerbuilder
   • Acrobat Pro to edit existing ERD PDF: masking, layering, editing
   • Keynote w/ ERD template
   • Visio
   • PowerPoint
   • Gliffy
2. Put together concrete examples of VegBIEN import problems
   • do we want to autofill certain fields prior to import?: no, mostly fill these in views and a few in triggers
3. How to deal with user-defined fields
   • standardize or convert to first-class fields?

• rename authorcodes to IDs to reflect ecological usage of the terms ID and code: no, author*codes are preferred
• add source namespace to relevant fields: DwC fields will have "_dwc" appended
• create data dictionary of VegBIEN fields
• save VegBank data dictionary in database comments on tables and columns
• convert whiteboard sketch of VegBIEN to ERD
  • zoom in on yellow tables where most of the revisions are
• create initial ERD of just the yellow tables for next week's conference call
  • put together list of tables that have changed
• ignore SALVIAS PlotCode in organisms data as it's a denormalized duplicate of the SiteCode in the plots data (PLOT_ID ties the organisms to plotevents)
• require all plots to have geospatial info (at least one of lat/long or locality name)
• deal with UNIQUE constraints on nullable columns
  • create multiple constraints, one for each combination of keys (e.g. plot: (reference, name) and (reference, location): no, use a UNIQUE index with an expression containing coalesce()
• namespacing on terms
• data catalog
• isomorphic attrs w/ VegX, DwC, etc.
• look at validation issues w/ concrete examples
  • error message output, input row
• minimum geospatial info

• don't require plots to have a name
• resolve catalognumber/code ambiguity in collection table
• add sizeclass table
• rename collection to specimen
• rename collectiveobservation to aggregateoccurrence to reflect VegX usage of aggregate and the new taxonoccurrence table