Input format for geospatial metadata

[Philipp Conzett]

As pointed out on the community call last week, there is some confusion about what format coordinates should have in the geospatial metadata block. The guidance text uses comma as the decimal separator, e.g., 180,0, but the correct format seems to be period, e.g., 180.0.

From some version (I can't remember which one, other than it was after 5.6) Dataverse Solr started to validate the format and content of the coordinate fields in the geospatial metadata block. As for the format, period not comma has to be used. As for the content for bounding boxes, the value for West Longitude must be lower than the value for East Longitude; the value for South Latitude must be lower than the value for North Latitude. This might seem obvious, but at DataverseNO, we got Solr validation errors for more than 900 datasets when we upgraded from v5.6 to v5.13. This indicates, that adding coordinate information is not as trivial as it might seem. We have fixed these datasets and updated our deposit guidelines accordingly; see section GEOSPATIAL METADATA.

Ideally, coordinate values should be validated at creation, as pointed out in this GitHub issue.

Best, Philipp

[Philip Durbin]

Hi Philipp,

Hey, thanks for bringing this up the other day. When we added geospatial search in Dataverse 5.13 we ended up making the geospatial bounding box much more strict. Previously, I believe authors could type whatever they want in there. Now Solr will now complain with errors like this: "Bad X value 343.68 is not in boundary Rect(minX=-180.0,maxX=180.0,minY=-90.0,maxY=90.0)". And this error down below is not handled especially well up in the Dataverse GUI.

So yes, I agree with you. We should fix this. I'm not sure which issue best represents the problem but probably one of these (which includes the one you found):

-  Dataset publishing prevented or slowed by errors related to possible validation of metadata entered in Geospatial Bounding Box fields #9421 - https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/9421

-  Add validation for entered coordinate values in Geospatial metadata (bounding boxes, etc) #9547- https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/9547

I hope this helps,

Phil

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dataverse Users Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dataverse-commu...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dataverse-community/623e03f6-89f4-4183-ae34-45223cd30b17n%40googlegroups.com.

--

Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin