StrataBlog

Contaminated data?

It’s been a while since the last blog post. We’ve been busy getting v3.0 out there and fixing anything that’s been cropping up, and many have now upgraded, or plan to upgrade in the near future.

One of the small but important changes in v3.0 was the addition of an occurrence type for “Transported” specimens, being those that are reworked environmentally but not stratigraphically. As well as this, we combined the “Caved” attribute into the same occurrence type, making them mutually exclusive, and thereby forming a hierarchy of “levels of displacement”, which begins with “In-situ” and ends with “Caved”, as illustrated on the new Picklist:

Since this introduction, we’ve had some feedback on whether we should also add a further level, of “Contaminated” occurrences. This would sit below Caved in the hierarchy. These can be specimens from modern contaminants, the lab, or drilling mud itself, none of which implicate caving of the borehole, but would be useful to be able to exclude from certain displays and operations.

We could add this new type as a further option in the v3.0 list. It would not require any changes to existing v3.0 databases, but an application update would be required for v3.0 (and v2.1) to be able to handle any data set which uses the new attribute.

Any comments on this proposal, positive or negative, would be welcome.