Pending update to ridigbio will break spocc!

[mgaynor1]

Currently ridigbio returns datecollected, a field that is randomly generated and may lack biological meaning. Current use of this field is biologically meaningless, thus may skew current research leveraging dates from this field. The generated dates are also difficult to detect, as they are randomly distributed.

We plan to update the ridigbio package to instead return "data.dwc:eventDate", "data.dwc:year", "data.dwc:month", and "data.dwc:day" - which are all text fields, rather than dates, but are not randomly generated, are directly from data providers, and may provide meaning in biological research. See current issue and pull request.

This modification will impact the following lines:

spocc/R/plugin_helpers.R

Line 34 in 59f6b3b

idigbio = 'datecollected', ala = 'eventDate')

spocc/R/occ2df.R

Line 104 in 59f6b3b

idigbio = "datecollected", obis = "eventDate",

spocc/R/plugins.r

Line 266 in 59f6b3b

opts$rq$datecollected <- list(type = "range", gte = date[1], lte = date[2])

Please let us know if you have any questions.

[vijaybarve]

Will the datecollected field will be deprecated with immediate effect? It will be helpful to slate it for deprecation for some time and other package maintainers could make the smooth transition to data.dwc:eventDate.

[mgaynor1]

datecollected will remain a field within iDigBio and not be deprecated, however, we plan to remove it from the default fields list for the idig_search_records() function. Fields can still be listed in the idig_search_records() function and datecollected will remain available through this function.

We recently identified multiple data users who are using the datecollected field in research (for ex. issues 1 and issue 2). We hope to prevent future misuse and lower the expertise required for data users, so we hope to make this change as soon as possible.

spocc and gatoRs are the only official CRAN packages that depend on ridigbio. gatoRs does not use the default fields, therefore this modification only will impact spocc.

How long would spocc maintainers need? We plan to publish our update as a new version, so couldn't spocc just set the requirement for ridigbio as <= 0.3.7?

[hannahlowens]

Resolved and on it's way to CRAN.