look_up()

[willgearty]

look_up()

[KEichenseer]

I sent an email to the ICS webmaster Nicholas Car to ask if they have tables or an existing database we could use.

How would you do use interval ages to correlate across time scales? That would work for GTS2012 to GTS2020 with the data we have, but where would you get age information for other stratigraphic systems?

[willgearty]

Macrostrat has lots of timescales with age information:
https://macrostrat.org/api/defs/timescales?all
https://macrostrat.org/api/defs/intervals?all

[LewisAJones]

Given the difficulty and the maintenance needed for this (as well as decision making from our side), perhaps we should consider having this function set up to match a user-defined table for now. Additional functionality can be added in the future that calls a table we have developed. This way the user is the one making the decisions about what matches what. Until we have some funding to start a proper curation of all these different timescales and matching them... I think this is probably quite a huge (long-term) task. Any thoughts?

[KEichenseer]

That's a good idea. What we could do is include our table as an example (it works well with the tetrapod and reef data), with a clear statement that there is no warranty that the assignments in these example tables are 100 % accurate.
We could implement that as calling our table if the user doesn't provide an interval_key argument?
I'll work on the function in the coming days and next week, let me know if you have further ideas.

[LewisAJones]

Not a bad idea to include an example of how this might look like! Maybe we can focus on just showing this for the reef data? This dataset is particularly problematic for linking to the GTS and I believe you've spent quite a bit of time working that stuff out in the past? I'm not sure we should make it default behaviour at the minute to call our table. I think we're still quite far from having something with a lot of coverage? I'll leave it with you though, just some general thoughts!