Location Service Questions

Questions

• To what extent are Location and StorageLocation aligned, coordinated, or even the same Authority?
  • This is the subject of an ongoing discussion, captured here.
• Q: Do Organizations have Locations?
  • Probably not in general, but perhaps in sense of a Museum building.
  • Organizations do have contact info, but this is not the same in a modeling sense. However, we might choose to associate contact info to Location for the purpose of mapping.
• Q: Do we need to bind location just to CollectionObjects, or to grouping entities like Exhibition and Loan?
  • A: Exhibition may have a location, but unlikely [PLS: it could have a building or room location, but this is rarely a useful concept, AFAIK]. A Group might be defined within an Exhibit and we might specify that that group has a location (room). In general, we should consider Location association to groups as well as objects, and make it easy to define Group locations.
• Q: How much do we want to provide much here?
  Note that there will be relatively few locations in many museums, and these can be described once and then mostly left alone. However, for things like an archive, the location is structured, and can be quite detailed: Institution/Building, room, rack, shelf, position. Should this all be structured, or should it just have some syntax constraints (e.g., numeric designations with a range for rack, shelf, position)?
  • AI: Review Archivists' Toolkit for some guidance on this.
  • A: I think we should allow for structure, but support simple flat namespace for buildings, etc.
• Q: Do we need to look more closely at the importance of location in the natural history domain?  For them, the location that the object came from takes on added significance.  For instance, the UC Museum of Paleontology describes their system as one that tracks localities as much as it does specimens.  They track things like stratigraphy. Is this a different kind of location?  Anthropology and Archaeology certainly have some sophisticated needs here too related to provenience (as distinct from provenance).
  • We need to consider stratigraphic information as distinct from Location. Cf. Specify discussion on this, as well as UCB Paleo collections model, etc.
  • We will model types of Location to distinguish Storage Location from Provenience or Location of Origin.
• Q: Will we model Provenance of objects (e.g., owning museums, collections) over time using Location information?