Location Service Questions

Questions

• Q: Do Organizations have Locations?
  • Probably not in general, but perhaps in sense of a Museum building.
• 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. 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).