iNaturalist Data Quality Webinar

[jwidness]

A couple relevant topics:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-it-easier-to-distinguish-how-coordinates-were-created/31070
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/record-positioning-method-for-coordinates-and-make-it-available-in-observations/31165

And a snippet from staff:

@kueda

The description you see under the map on the observation detail pages can get set by a variety of means, i.e. it is not meant to be consistent or under the system’s control. In fact, the observer can edit it to be whatever they want. We generally refer to this text as the “Locality Notes” or the place_guess (that’s it’s name in the database). Here are the ways it gets set automatically based on the software we have written:

1. On the website, using the Uploader, searching for a place by name or clicking the map will populate the Locality Notes using Google Places Autocomplete API (search) or the Google Geocoding API (click) (the user can also change them manually at this point)
2. If you submit an observation and the Locality Notes are blank, we will attempt to fill them out using the coordinates, precision, and iNat places that contain those coordinates.
3. The Android app works similarly to the website and uses basically the same Google-based methods of turning coordinates and searches into place names
4. The iPhone app does something similar except it uses the Apple equivalent of Google’s geocoding APIs.
5. Seek works similarly to the other mobile apps, depending on what operating system it’s running on

And then for all of these cases, if the observation location is obscured, there is a coarsening applied on top of the locality notes, such that the original locality notes are stored privately (for the user and trusted data sharing partners), and the coarse locality notes are shown publicly and provided in exports/the API.

@sbushes

Is there a feature request for data to be added of how location names of generated?

I don’t think there is a request for that, but based on the reception to the one to store how coordinates are generated and the staff quote above, I would personally highly doubt that iNat would be interested in a method to store how the locality notes are generated for specific observations.