Platform wide attribute changes

We've just completed a platform wide stock take and clean up of all attributes with thanks to the efforts of Katarina Christenson.

Attributes are the additional questions or fields that the platform asks you to fill in reporting a sighting. E.g. "Was the plant in flower?" or "What was the animal's health" etc.

When we started out, almost 13 years ago, our initial assumption was that moderators should be able to easily define new attributes for categories and species within the taxonomy, so we had developed a suite of tools to make the creation/update/deletion of attributes easy for moderators.

Over time, what actually resulted, was an inconsistent sprawl of attributes that were unintentionally doubled up, skipped, implemented for some categories and species, but not others.

What we learnt was:

• There were a handful of core attributes that should apply to specific categories globally (and are therefore inherited by child categories and species within these categories)
• There were a couple of really good examples where attributes were applied at the species level and they were providing considerable value for a particular project or initiative
• Beyond this, it didn't really make sense to define attributes at the species level, but instead, it made a whole lot more sense to give projects the ability to define their own attributes at the collection level E.g. for a particular project or initiative

With Katarina's help, we have:

• Conducted a full audit of all existing attributes
• Removed redundant, doubled up and similar attributes
• Standardised and consolidated the naming and placement of attributes across categories
• Improved the data structure of some common attributes to result in higher quality data that can be more easily reported on
• Removed stray attributes from particular species that didn't need to be there or were taken care of by category level attributes

Longer term, we will enhance collections to allow anyone to define their own attributes for their own collections.

Until that functionality is ready, there are 2 exemptions where we have allowed attributes to remain in place at the species level:

• Michael M's gang gang project (captures important information specific to gang gangs - longer term this would be migrated to a collection similar to glossies in the mist and attributes removed from the gang gang species itself)
• NSW Save Our Species Glossies in the Mist (captures important information specific to glossy blacks on the Southern Highlands - longer term, these attributes will hang off the GITM project collection rather than the Glossy Black species itself like they currently do)

Important note for moderators

When you create a new category, any attributes defined by it's parent category will be automatically inherited.

If your new category justifies its own special attributes, you can contact the NatureMapr support team to request additional attributes to be setup.

Attribute creation and editing tools for categories and species will no longer be provided by the platform.

In the future, projects will have the flexibility to define their own attibutes for their own projects.