Fauna Element - Blank Coding Sheet

Summary

This coding sheet includes the entire list of faunal elements in the tDAR ontology. It can be downloaded and used to create a coding sheet that easily maps to the Fauna Element Ontology. To use this coding sheet, in column A fill in any code number (or alpha abbreviations) associated with the element 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, altgernate 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 "Element". For Map it to an Ontology choose "Fauna Element Ontology ". 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. Because the auto suggest feature will also fill in close matches, 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.

Cite this Record

Fauna Element - Blank Coding Sheet. 2012 ( tDAR id: 376385) ; doi:10.6067/XCV8ZW1K5G

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Ontology: Fauna Element Ontology

Category: Fauna

Subcategory: Element

Coding Rules

Code Term Description Mapped Ontology Node
Code Value Alternate
Special Coding Rules: These entries are not in the coding-sheet, but represent edge-cases in Data Integration that may benefit from custom mappings

File Information

  Name Size Creation Date Date Uploaded Access
element-coding-blank-2012-07-10.xls 37.50kb Jul 10, 2012 10:34:34 PM Public