associating an action (project, expedition, cruise) with an organization

[smrgeoinfo]

Action appears to be the only way to represent projects/initiatives/expedition/cruise that are the context for many sampling and analysis activities. There appear to be two ways to bind an activity like this to a sponsoring (e.g. funding, logistics) organization:

1. use the organization association on method. Problem-- what is the organization property on method supposed to mean? Since method has no binding to equipment or time, it cannot represent a particular instance of the method, rather its a representation of the method as an abstract process. Why does this have a tight binding to an organization? the method could be executed by many organizations.
2. the torturous path action-actionby-affiliations-organization. But Person is mandatory on affiliations, where organization is optional; this means to make this work you have to have a dummy person for the affiliations.personid to generate a valid affiliations instance.

Solution: Affiliation should have constraint (personid or organizationid) is not null. Looks like enforcing this in Postgresql needs a function. At least make both person and organiztion nilable.

[klehnert55]

Changes will further impact the difference of our schema to the ODM2.

…

On 6/26/17 08:19 AM, Stephen Richard wrote: Action appears to be the only way to represent projects/initiatives/expedition/cruise that are the context for many sampling and analysis activities. There appear to be two ways to bind an activity like this to a sponsoring (e.g. funding, logistics) organization: 1. use the organization association on method. Problem-- what is this association supposed to mean? Since method has no binding to equipment or time, it cannot represent a particular instance of the method, rather its a representation of the method as an abstract process. Why does this have a tight binding to an organization? the method could be executed by many organizations. 2. the torturous path action-actionby-affiliations-organization. But Person is mandatory on affiliations, where organization is optional; this means to make this work you have to have a dummy person for the affiliations.personid to generate a valid affiliations instance. Solution: Affiliation should have constraint (personid or organizationid) is not null. Looks like enforcing this in Postgresql needs a function <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15178859/postgres-constraint-ensuring-one-column-of-many-is-present>. At least make both person and organiztion nilable. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#137>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AG9LCkGWYT4efDR7mKr5cdpdd19S56WBks5sH6HFgaJpZM4OFO47>.

-- Dr. Kerstin Lehnert Doherty Senior Research Scientist Director, Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Columbia University Palisades, NY, 10964 (845) 365-8506 http://www.iedadata.org http://www.earthchem.org http://www.igsn.org

[horsburgh]

@smrgeoinfo - you might also consider grouping results from a project/initiative/expedition/cruise into a Dataset.

[aufdenkampe]

I just noticed this issue.

Using #2 above (i.e. via action-actionby-affiliations-organization) with a general "Staff" person was intent, so that we could implement the constraint in all RDBMS without the need for a function.