Add International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS)'s International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICC) to Specify

[grantfitzsimmons]

We have heard from a number of institutions that they would like to see and reference the ICC within Specify.

From Dr Nicholas Car, Webmaster for ICS:

If/when you do redistribute the Chart data, please could you:

preserve the identifiers for each time/strat unit, so Jurassic is http://resource.geosciml.org/classifier/ics/ischart/Jurassic
this allows linking back to the source-of-truth
preserve the colours used, as per the Colour Chart (Excel) and the colour markers in the data version of the Chart for consistency

This means we also need to include the color codes for each ICS node. In the future, we could have the colors be displayed in the tree viewer.

Sourcing

The data can be retrieved from GeoSciML in RDF, and within the RDF file it contains all supported languages.

I should have noted that since Specify7 is implemented in Python, at least the web part of it, you could easily use RDFLib to query the RDF data version of the Chart.

It should be pretty easy to load and query it, as per the Getting Started parsing examples in the RDFLib README file.

The latest data version of the Chart will soon (a month or two) always be available via the vocabulary's IRI, http://resource.geosciml.org/classifier/ics/ischart, so soon enough you'll be able to directly pull data from there.

Updating

Since this data will not be stored in the database, we would simply have to replace the RDF file periodically in the Specify 7 static files.

Usage

• The ICC would display in a dialog that allows the user to switch between any number of languages
• This dialog could be displayed easily based on a button press. While we are not completely certain where this could appear, we have discussed:
  • On the QCBX for any link to GeologicTimePeriod
  • Somehow accessible via the QB
  • Shown via an item in the user tools menu

NOTES: for Geo V2.0