Thank you for your interest in Record Cleaner and its rules. Writing rules requires considerable knowledge not to mention patience and accuracy. Please contact the Biological Records Centre if you are interested in contributing to this valuable work
These pages describe the structure of the rule sets that sit behind Record Cleaner, allowing you to create and update rules to be used within Record Cleaner. It isn’t essential to create files for all of the rule types in order to use Record Cleaner, except each rule set must have an id_difficulty file. All of the Organism Keys that appear within the rule set must be listed in the ID difficulty file.
To start setting up rules, create a main folder with the name of your recording scheme. Inside this folder, create a folder for each rule set you would like to create. If you would only like to create one rule set, you should still place these inside a folder (to keep the two-folder structure). The basic folder structure will therefore look like this:
--> My recording scheme
|
--> My rule set
|
--> difficulty_codes.csv
id_difficulty.csv
From here, you can start adding rules into your folder. The below sections describe the structure of rules in the csv files. Text highlighted in blue will appear in messages to recorders.
We have described the rules using “taxa” instead of species, as you could create a rule for a taxon at any level (e.g. a species aggregate, a subspecies or a genus). However, rules are not applied to taxa that are lower down in the classification (e.g. a rule for Harmonia axyridis will not be applied to Harmonia axyridis form succinea).