Place Authority requirements for UCB collections

UC Berkeley informatics staff have been identifying requirements and information schema for CollectionSpace's Place Authority.  Discussions were held with experts representing cultural heritage and natural history collections.  The resulting schema though large represents a common set of fields that can be used across a wide range of collection types.  We anticipate that many deploying institutions will hide fields that are not useful to them.  In fact, we might develop recommendations for this. 

The Place Authority requirements on the CollectionSpace wiki are still met.  In addition, we were meeting the local requirement:

  • Allow users to capture and manage information about coordinates including information from georeferencing activities (whether by person or computer) used by mapping applications

Place Authority Schema, UCB version

An excel file was used to represent the schema visually and capture a series of data examples.

Here is the original draft schema for a CollectionSpace Place Authority.

A wireframe is underway and will be based on the spreadsheet with sample data.

Here are some useful links:

Categories for the Description of Works of Art Place/Location Authority (Getty Research Institute)

http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa/30place.html

Visual Resource Association (VRA) Core 4.0 (Library of Congress)

http://www.loc.gov/standards/vracore/schemas.html

Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) Introduction to Darwin Core

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/

TDWG Darwin Core Quick Reference Guide: Location Terms

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#locationindex

GADM Database of Global Administrative Areas

http://www.gadm.org/

Please send comments and questions to chris.hoffman@berkeley.edu or post on the work or talk lists.