opendata/Hunting-and-Fishing

List non-weapon-specific portions of hunting seasons

waldoj opened this issue · 2 comments

At present, we break down hunting seasons by weapon, then date ranges, then places. That generally works, but not always. When hunting bear, there's muzzleloader season, modern rifle season, youth and apprentice season, and bear hound training/chase season. The first two are covered, but the latter two are decidedly not.

So breaking down types of seasons by weapon doesn't really make sense. Even "method" doesn't make sense, because while using a bear hound is a method, youth and apprentice season is not. But the structural concept—a container that holds date ranges that correspond to places—is sound.

Finally, this highlights the need to define each of these weapons/methods/whatever. At the moments, we just make the key "firearms" or "muzzleloader," and don't explain any further.

So perhaps the weapon element needs to become, simply, type, for the kind of season that it is. Each type would need to be unique, and the value of type becomes a label, rather than the actual descriptor. We'd then need a child element or two that goes into detail as to what that type really means. It may be that the methods element is adequate as a descriptor, but I still think that we'd need a long description, since we're not liable to name a JSON element bear hound training/chase season.

I couldn't stomach an element named type, so instead I decided to create a seasons container that contains a 1+ season elements. "Weapon" is a misnomer ("archery" is not a weapon—a bow and arrow is a weapon), so I renamed that method. We previously had a method element that was an array of specifications about the method (e.g., "Archery tackle (including crossbows) only")—that's been renamed method_rules.