Mapping England and United Kingdom

[fbungarz]

Btw: which fields do you use for pictures shot in Galapagos Islands, Frank?

Hi Vlad,
brilliant question
The Galapagos are, politically/administratively, a province ("provincia") of Ecuador divided in three counties ("parroquias").
Geographically the Getty Thesaurus (generally a very widely accepted standard of geographic place names) refers to the archipelago as "island group". That is unfortunate, because a publication by Snell et al. (1995) suggested to group the more than 100 island into several biogeographically and geologically island groups. Thus, for example the central island of Santa Cruz has several close satellite islands, islets and rocks, together Snell et al. (1995) treat thos as one of several main island groups - instead of calling the entire archipelago an island group in the sense of Getty's.
The National Park and the Research station generally follow Snell et al. (1995). So the labels that I am using to tag the photos use the political hierarchy mapped to the relevant IPTC fields, but below that the geo-labels follow Snell et al. (1995) - there are no fields available in IPTC, but the DarwinCore has some suitable fields - like island group and island, to which those labels are mapped.

Cheers,
Frank

[Mke]

Fact is, most "countries" of the world have at least four different administrative political levels.
IPTC only recognizes three of them "country - state/province - city" it is reasonable to fill in these fields as "United Kingdom - England - London", and use "Germany - Saxony - Leipzig" in the case of Germany.

I completely agree - and hopefully I'm not off the mark saying that the city field could be (legitimately?) employed for non-cities (such as towns, villages, or even natural areas) too. (Btw: which fields do you use for pictures shot in Galapagos Islands, Frank?)

I take a similar view, but map them to "UK - County - City" (or just UK - City in the case of free-standing cities like London and Bristol).

[vlad]

Mke, are you talking about catalog labels or location fields? Which field do you use for County?

[Mke]

Mke, are you talking about catalog labels or location fields? Which field do you use for County?

My catalog label for County is mapped to Iptc4xmpExt:LocationCreated.Iptc4xmpExt:ProvinceState, for example.

Edit: Hmm - well I thought it was, but having just checked it's not showing up as expected in all images. Will have to go away and work out why...

[JeffK]

I've only just come across this thread but it caught my eye. After five trips to the UK from Australia since 2009 I have literally tens of thousands of photos which I am in the process of cataloging. So I'll read the thread carefully; however the issue of country UK or England etc came up for me too.

Jeff

[fbungarz]

Wikipedia says:

England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are not themselves listed in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) list of countries. However the ISO list of the subdivisions of the UK, compiled by British Standards and the UK's Office for National Statistics, uses "country" to describe England, Scotland and Wales.[5] Northern Ireland, in contrast, is described as a "province" in the same lists

[bold face added by me]

There was recently a bit of discussion in the IDimager forum here on ISO country codes (http://forum.idimager.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=24279), and it was suggested that the PSu GEO-location lookup follows the ISO list:
http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes.htm

That list uses GBR as the tree-letter acronym for the United Kingdom, which in that list is treated as a country. [Funny, isn't it? Wouldn't "UKD" perhaps be a more logical choice?] Anyway - if you follow that standard, then obviously you cannot also treat England, Scotland and Wales as separate countries as well (obviously there are no two separate "country" fields in IPTC).

So, what do you do with those "countries" that belong to the United Kingdom?
Out of curiosity, I just googled "Is England a province of the united kingdom?" and this was the first link to pop up:

http://www.factiva.com/CP_Developer/Pro ... _table.htm

Now, if you use "country = United Kingdom", "province/state = England", what do you do with the counties...? Doesn't quite make sense to treat them as provinces too, right?

Now, could it be that we are moving in circles

[bimo]

Now, could it be that we are moving in circles

Personally, I have no doubt we are:

Neither England nor Scotland nor Wales nor Northern Ireland are listed in the ISO list of countries. Any of these four are a state like the 50 states are which form the USA.

The only way to overcome the problem is also already mentioned in the thread:

... he would have to use keywords or custom fields.

So, a custom field named e.g. "county" will do the trick.

[Stephen]

This has really got of track and I’m afraid that I followed the lead and contributed to that. It is not a question of historical events but of the best way to file images. It also presumes that you wish to enable people ‘outside your system’ who do not have your PSu database to benefit most from your images, i.e. the data must be in a recognisable place within the file.

It is possible that somebody might search for a 'mountain' and 'Scotland', but would not use 'United Kingdom', if they want to see a typical Scottish mountain. Likewise, others will search for England. So Scotland and England need to be added somewhere in addition to the United Kingdom.

The point of this thread has only changed slightly since my first posting. We (or I) now know about the limitation of the standards and I definitely like to stick to standards, unless they are impossible to work with.

So, according to those standards, both England (or Scotland for that matter) are both states as far as IPTC are concerned, but according to the same recommendation, so also are Berkshire or Kincardineshire (termed counties in the British Isles).

There are 2 IPTC fields available and in most cases they would have the same content. That being so, one could perhaps choose to use one for what most people might term a country, i.e. Scotland or England and the other for what most people would term a county, i.e. Berkshire or Kincardineshire:
Iptc4xmpExt:LocationCreated.Iptc4xmpExt:ProvinceState
Iptc4xmpExt:LocationShown.Iptc4xmpExt:ProvinceState

P.S. London is not a good example to quote because (although there are exceptions) a county or ‘state’ designation is usually not needed when describing London. I will not venture to discuss the complicated matter of the City of London or the City of Westminster, which does not concern me.

IMHO, the solution would avoid using synonyms which would be difficult implement and have the disadvantage that they can become displaced if they are not allocated under an IPTC tag. A keyword is not enough.

As I have not been cataloguing for long, I’m just seeking tips on the best practice and came across this anomaly occurring in the British Isles. Surely others must have tackled this before.

Please everybody, let's try to stay on track and not discuss, history, politics or GPS

Edited: cleaning up

[fbungarz]

Hi Stephen & Bimo,
I guess I am partially to blame for making this overly complicated. My apologies.
My recommendation: why not use the DarwinCore county field instead (!) of creating a separate custom field for that purpose. Custom fields are great if no standard field at all is available, but in this case you can , and in my opinion should use the DarwinCore county field. Following a standard is always better than introducing a custom field that likely no other program will ever read. [Yes, the DarwinCore is not yet widely adopted, but still more likely will be than several different custom fields set up individually by various PSu users].
And if you don't like switching different palettes in the Details panel - simply add the relevant fields to the Info panel!

This is what I use:
photoshop:Country = United Kingdom
photoshop:State = England
dwc:dctermsLocation.dwc:county = Norfolk

Please note that I am (on purpose) using the original XMP names of these fields, not their "labels". If you switch for example to the German language locale this will eventually look like this:

Staat = United Kingdom
Bundesland/Kanton = England
Kreis = Norfolk

If you use English, it is:

Country = United Kingdom
State/Province = England
County = Norfolk

And so forth...

[Please note: the current built still uses the default (English) names for these fields, but for consistency throughout the user interface of PSu this will eventually get changed in one of the upcoming versions. So, therefore, some of the discussion here in a way is redundant. Personally I am using the English language version of PSu, but if you are using PSu in a different language you will come across a different vocabulary anyway. As I tried to point out in a previous post it is virtually impossible to literally translate these fields.]

All the best,
Frank

[Stephen]

My recommendation: why not use the DarwinCore county field instead (!) of creating a separate custom field for that purpose. Custom fields are great if no standard field at all is available, but in this case you can , and in my opinion should use the DarwinCore county field.

This is what I use:
photoshop:Country = United Kingdom
photoshop:State = England
dwc:dctermsLocation.dwc:county = Norfolk

Thanks, that looks like an option. How would one enable the DarwinCore functionality in the latest PSu release?

[fbungarz]

Hi Stephen,
if you use 3.3. all the fields are already there.

You can see them if you select the correct panel in the Details Panel, using this fold-out button:

SelectDetail_Panel.jpg (138.65 KiB) Viewed 7537 times

I recommend you choose the Xpress panel, else the amount of fields available can be slightly overwhelming:

DarwinCore_Panels.jpg (127.57 KiB) Viewed 7537 times

Your Detail panel will then include three new categories from the Darwin Core; the County field is under the location tab:

DarwinCore_County.jpg (120.19 KiB) Viewed 7537 times

For convenience you can add that to the PSu Info panel:

InfoPanel_add_DwC_County.jpg (259.23 KiB) Viewed 7537 times

The macro code is "dwc:dctermsLocation.dwc:county"

I hope those instructions are clear.

Cheers,
Frank

[Stephen]

Thanks, Frank,

Now that I see where it is, I have set up the county mapping under places.

As 'Details' is my daily 'go-to' panel and I usually use the 'advanced' setting, I only have to map each county once and it will be fine. I rarely use the 'Info' panel, but I can see the county as a label, so that is fine.