Fauna Taxon - Blank Southwest US Coding Sheet

Summary

This coding sheet can be downloaded and used to create a coding sheet that easily maps to the Fauna Taxon Ontology - Southwest US. To use this coding sheet, in column A fill in any code number (or alpha abbreviations) associated with the taxon labels in columns B and C. For codes that you have that do not have a corresponding label in the blank coding sheet, just insert a lines in the spreadsheet with the code, label, and synonym (usually, code, scientific name, common name--if any) in columns A, B, and C respectively, as with the other entries. You can insert the lines anywhere; it doesn't matter. For each code, you must have a label, but need not have a synonym.

After you have entered all the codes, use Excel's Data>Sort function to sort all of the lines and columns A-C on column A. You will end up with a coding key in code number order. Double check that you have all the codes in your key represented, fix any errors or missing lines, then delete all the lines without codes (which should all be below the lines with codes) and what was the title line of "Code Label Alternate". The leading blanks in the labels are ignored. Save your Excel file in a place you can find it (e.g. the Windows Desktop).

In tDAR, you then click on "New" and "Coding Sheet". Enter the title, description, and other metadata. For the Category choose "Fauna" and for the Subcategory choose "Taxon". For Map it to an Ontology choose "Fauna Taxon Ontology - Southwest US". For Submit a Coding Sheet, choose "Upload an Excel or CSV coding sheet file" from the dropdown box and browse to your edited Excel sheet to upload it. Then "Save" the coding sheet. Once it has been saved, you will have a view of the uploaded coding sheet.

On the ribbon near the top of the screen, click on “map ontology” and when the new screen appears click on “auto suggest matches”. tDAR will fill in all of the exact matches. However, you may have to manually map the codes that you added to the spreadsheet. The auto suggest feature will also fill in close matches (e.g. it will match a newly entered code labeled "deer-sized" with Odocoileus, because deer is a synonym of the scientific name). You may decide tDAR's suggestion is OK, or you may decide that it is better to change the mapping of "deer-sized" to "large mammal." In any event, you should check the mappings of all of the entries that you added (which will not have exact matches) to make sure that they are mapped properly or to map them yourself. Save the result and your coding sheet is now linked to the ontology. At that point, any data set that (already or in the future) uses this coding sheet is mapped to the Taxon ontology.

n.b. If you are changing mappings it may be useful to have a printed version of the taxon ontology in hand so you know the possible choices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Kintigh - Fauna Ontologies

Ontology: Fauna Taxon Ontology - Southwest US

Coding Rules

File Information