Area



The Area table provides geographic names given for a specific area of investigations. The table has two fields, one for the area name and one for a link to a descriptive page, mostly linked to Wikipedia. Area names attribute to the Campaign and Event tables. The content of the area field in event appears in the metaheader in the Event(s) line as Location: ....

To define a new area, open the Area table in 4D, click New and add geographic name and link. To increase search hits, the geographic name should include all related expressions.

Example 1: defining the river Lena should include Siberia, Russia.

Example 2: the definition of the glacier Gurgler Ferner should include a more detailed specification of area and country Gurgler Ferner, Ötztaler Alpen, Tirol, Österreich.

When trying to define already existing names, the system will prompt with an alert (This key already exists ...). During the import of events, new area names as it appear in the event list will automatically be added to the area table. !Be aware of misspellings!

To search for a certain area, it might be best to use the contains operator.

Links

 * International Hydrographic Organization
 * IHO (1953) Limits of oceans and seas (pdf, 1 MB)
 * IHO (1998) Standards for hydrographic surveys (pdf, 2 MB)
 * EarthExplorer - search for the position of localities, cities, villages or geographic features provided by the USGS

Vision: Names of areas and localities are not standardized yet and thus should be used for data retrievals with care. Some standardization was planned by using the Limits of oceans and seas as defined by the IHO and border lines of countries, continents and islands. For continents above sea level, the names of the countries would be included. While importing new events, an algorithms could automatically set the relations to the specific entry in the area table. In turn this would allow retrievals of data in specific areas, e.g. by using a clickable map or a retrieval like which data are available in the Gulf of Mexico.