Over 18000 iNat places have no ancestry, and another 5000+ have only continent level ancestry. While ancestry isn’t crucial most of the time, it can be helpful in a number of ways, e.g. for network node users (see here and here ), and for disambiguating places with similar names. I would like to req…

[image] jwidness: Automatic ancestry assignment for existing places. And how should that automatic process work? It should assign to a country or state?

I envisioned an algorithm that would assign the smallest standard place the place fits in.

i wonder if you’ll get some strangeness with this approach because borders in your place’s borders and its theoretical parent place should share a border, but the border varies slightly because they were drawn slightly differently? for example, suppose i create a city that should be entirely within …

I left some details out on purpose because I didn’t want to bog down the request. I was actually only going to propose using the bounding box of the place in question because the calculation is simpler and since around 95% of places lacking ancestry are smaller than the average US county, it didn’t…

Voted ‘Yes’ because I’d like to browse the places hierarchy. There seems to be sufficient fields in the database to allow this but the APIv1 doesn’t provide the equivalent of /places?parent_place_id=6783&recursive=true The functionality is broken anyway since very few places have a valid parent_id…

Doable, but the issue is how do we determine whether the place creator purposely didn’t add a parent place or not? Some people deliberately don’t add a parent for various reasons. While I agree the overall benefit of doing this would be large, in principle it’s similar to editing another user’s proj…

[image] tiwane: Some people deliberately don’t add a parent for various reasons. What are some of the reasons?

I suspect it’s mostly political, ie they don’t want their places being listed as being under a certain place. For what it’s worth I’m basically for doing this because the benefits seem outweigh what I think are be minimal costs (I suspect most parentless places were not made on purpose) but it woul…

Add ancestry to all iNat places

Feature Requests

carrieseltzer July 7, 2021, 11:53pm 11

What are some of the reasons?

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Add ancestry to all iNat places

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