BF Workbench is a restricted scientific system. Records are available only to registered, authorised accounts.

Geography

Countries, subdivisions, synonyms, retiring and moving places.

How-to

The geography registry is the list of places a record's collection site can be recorded against: countries and oceans at the top level, and the provinces, states and territories beneath each country. Every country/ocean and province/state value on a record is a link to an entry in this list, not free text. You maintain it from Platform Management → Controlled Terms → Geography when a place is missing, misspelt, renamed, or has ceased to exist.

How it works

Each entry has a Name, a Rank (country, ocean or a subdivision rank such as province or state), a Type, ISO codes (ISO α-2 and ISO α-3 for countries, a Subdivision Code for subdivisions), a UN-recognized flag, a status of active or defunct, and any number of synonyms. A subdivision always belongs to exactly one country.

The page shows a searchable list of countries and oceans on the left, with pills counting countries and oceans, synonyms and defunct entries. Select an entry to see its metadata, subdivisions and synonyms, with a record count beside each.

How uploads are resolved

Batch specimen uploads are matched against a copy of the registry that the record store exports each night. That copy contains the active countries and their active subdivisions. Matching ignores case and treats any run of spaces, slashes, underscores or hyphens as a single space, so KwaZulu-Natal, kwazulu natal and KWAZULU_NATAL are the same name.

  1. country/ocean is matched by name, ISO α-2 code or ISO α-3 code.
  2. province/state is matched by name within that country. If no subdivision matches, the record is linked to the country alone.
  3. A value that matches nothing is removed from the record, which still loads without it. An unrecognised place is not an error; see Batch specimen upload.

The single-specimen form works differently: its country and province fields are autocompleted from the live registry, so a new entry is offered there at once. Details of the matching are in The two ingest jobs.

Add a place

  • Add Country/Ocean asks for the name, the type (country or ocean), the ISO codes and whether the entry is recognised by the United Nations. New entries start as active.
  • Add Subdivision is on the country's detail panel. Give the name, the subdivision code and the rank (province, state, territory and so on). The parent must be a country; oceans have no subdivisions.
  • Edit Metadata changes the name, ISO codes, UN recognition and type of an existing entry. Records store a link to the entry, so a rename shows on every record that references it; there is nothing to reload.

Synonyms

Add Synonym records an alternative name for an entry, such as a former official name, with an optional source or note. Synonyms appear in the entry's detail and in the page's counts, and can be removed from the same panel.

Good to know: Synonyms are reference information for curators. Uploads are matched on the entry's name and ISO codes only, so a spreadsheet that uses a former name will not resolve. Correct the spreadsheet, or rename the entry if the former name is the one in current use.

Retire, reinstate and move

Retire marks an entry defunct without deleting it. The dialog shows how many records reference the entry and lets you name a Successor, the entry that has replaced it, which is stored with the retired entry. Retiring is refused while records still reference the entry or while any of its subdivisions is still active; retire the subdivisions first. The dialog also asks for a reason and a note.

Reinstate returns a retired entry to active and clears its successor.

Move re-parents a subdivision under a different country, for the rare case of a boundary change. It applies to subdivisions only; a country cannot be moved. The new parent must be a country, and a reason is required. Records that reference the subdivision keep their link, so from then on they report the new country.

Effect on existing records

Nothing on this page rewrites a record. Records hold a link to a registry entry, so editing an entry changes what those records display, moving a subdivision changes which country they fall under, and retiring an entry is blocked while records depend on it. Retired entries are left out of the nightly copy used for batch uploads, so new spreadsheets cannot be matched to them.

Good to know

  • The reason and note typed into the Retire and Move dialogs are not kept. No change history is recorded for the geography registry; note significant changes elsewhere if your procedures require it.
  • The record counts beside entries come from a statistics table and are not live. The retire guard uses the same counts.
  • Changes made here reach batch uploads after the next nightly export; the single-specimen form sees them immediately.
  • Only administrators can open this page or change the registry. Other users meet it through the specimen forms, search and the record detail.