GRIMS locality
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Standards for locality descriptions
by RHamilton
What goes into Locality?
Any feature that isn’t a named populated place (village, town, city) or administrative division (district, province), including:
| Category | Examples |
| Other types of feature | lakes, rivers |
| Vague regional descriptions that may include more than one town/village/district | Ingham/Allingham, Cairns-Townsville area |
| Institutes | Burdekin Rural Education Centre |
| Directions / description | 2 km E of Los Baños |
Notes:
- To the extent possible, the locality description should be standardized. See below
- Unverified features or descriptions that we can’t understand (e.g. “HEBESA (PANA)”) will also go into Locality, but only after validation / cross-referencing with Isaiah, Yunlong or gazetteers. For the initial step, they should be left where they are
- Not all punctuation indicates a locality description: “O' THOM” might be a village or town name. These should also be left where they are until validated.
- There is no need to record the IRGCIS field that originally held the locality description. For example, don’t put “TOWN=79.7 KM N OF JULIA CREEK;DISTRICT=ON NORMANTON ROAD;PROV=NEAR GEORGETOWN”. This locality description should be “79.7 km N of Julia Creek, on Normanton Road, near Georgetown”
- Locality description is not the same as original data. Original data should be recorded exactly as provided on original documents, not standardized.
Town, village or district?
In many cases, one place name appears in IRGCIS sometimes as village, sometimes as town, sometimes as district.
I have made no attempt to rationalize town/village differences
Often one name can be used for both a town and a district. e.g. Adelaide in Australia is an ADM2 district and also the capital city of that district (www.statoids.com). In these cases:
- Where the name appears as a district, leave it as district
- Where the name appears as town or village, leave it as town or village but suppose it is also in the district of the same name
- Where the name appears as part of a description (e.g. “100km S of Adelaide”), I suppose
- The name refers to the town not the district.
- The place described is not necessarily in the district, so leave the district unchanged
Rules for case and punctuation
| Category | Rule | Example |
| Place names | Proper case | Los Baños, West Bengal |
| Compass directions (not part of place name) | Upper case abbreviation without punctuation or embedded spaces, space before and after | N,S,E,W, NE, SE, NNE, ENE |
| Distances | Standard abbreviation, lower case, space before and after, no punctuation | m, km, mi |
| Linking words | Sentence case, in full not abbreviated | from, to, after, before, along, and |
| Types of feature that aren’t names | Sentence case, in full not abbreviated | highway, river, lake |
