OSUC Database Structure: Collecting-Event Cluster
A few notes: We have arbitrarily limited the number of collectors that we record to three. For those who may feel this to be inefficient, several work-arounds are possible: increasing the number of collector fields, creating a Collector table in which the people are recorded, recording those people in something like the Organization table, etc. The new version of the ASC information model abandons the breakdown of time categories and reverts to a single field in the collecting_event table. Retaining the distinction between actual dates and more nebulous characterizations of the time when a specimen was collected allows the database user to take advantage of any date arithmetic that might be available in their RDBMS (e.g., how many specimens were collected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November). Localities may be specified to any level of precision; in most collections that level will be very heterogeneous. We've not fully explored the possiblities within the habitat description domain, and many refinements are obvious.