[tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

[John Wieczorek]

It would be immensely useful if someone capable of capturing a clear
and concise summary of this lively discussion in commentary about the
Darwin Core term taxonConceptID on
http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/wiki/Taxon, which is sadly lacking
in any guidance on the subject.

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 3:58 AM, David Remsen (GBIF) <dremsen at gbif.org> wrote:
>
> Pete - you just summed up much of where I left off in my just-sent post.
> If we can present those curating occurrence records with a comprehensive set
> of relevant concept options, ideally tied to reference publications like
> field guides, etc.,  we can support the use of concept identifiers in those
> records.    That provides the basis for having some idea of the process by
> which they determined what name to use.
> DR
>
> To Paddy et al. I don't know if we really know unless we have some idea of
> the process by which they determined what name to use.
> - Pete
>
> On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> What you're asking for would certainly be nice!  But I was aiming more for
>> what you described as "an improvement". Baby steps.... :-)
>>
>> Seriously, though -- I agree taxonomists have failed to be sufficiently
>> explicit in their writings over the centuries to provide the raw material
>> for machine-generated reasoning and inferencing through the content of their
>> documents.  However, I'm not so sure they have failed to provide sufficient
>> information to allow for (mostly) reliable and accurate human- (or at least
>> taxonomist-) generated reasoning and inferencing.  That's why I think a key
>> aspect of all of this -- especially for legacy content -- is third-party
>> assertions.  I don't think it's true that "most" species descriptions result
>> in persons 1&2 assinging a given specimen to two separate concepts.  But
>> certainly there are enough to represent a non-trivial problem.
>>
>> Rich
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Peter DeVries [mailto:pete.devries at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 7:24 PM
>> To: Richard Pyle
>> Cc: David Remsen (GBIF); tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; Kevin Richards;
>> Jerry Cooper; dmozzherin; David Patterson
>> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking
>>
>> I think that the problem is that most species descriptions are written a
>> way that person1 interprets specimenA as conceptB and person2 interprets
>> specimenA and ConceptC.
>> This needs to be made more scientific so that one can test what
>> proportions of specimens actually conform to the description (concept).
>> These descriptions should be open, world readable and reference-able via a
>> URI.
>> Respectfully,
>> - Pete
>> ** There also seems to be mismatch between the concept the human
>> identifier choose (often via a key) and the species description (concept) to
>> which you are saying their data applies.
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> > That said modeling relationships between taxonomic publications where
>>> > the authors actually read the original species description, reviewed
>>> > the type specimens, and thought about the actual species conscription
>>> > is
>>> appropriate.
>>>
>>> This is the sort of things the Meta-Authorities would take into account
>>> when
>>> selecting a "follow-this-treatment" Usage-Instance for the preferred
>>> treatment of a name.
>>>
>>>
>>> > Also consider that a large proportion of specimens are misidentified,
>>> > and it occurs to me that modeling things like species occurrences as
>>> > if they are Puma concolor (Linnaeus, 1771) sensu stricto is probably
>>> > not appropriate. At best they are something like (Felis concolor /
>>> > Puma concolor) with some significant level of error.
>>>
>>> GNA can't helpw ith that directly -- but it can help indirectly.  Imagine
>>> a
>>> service that takes ever specimen in a given collection's database, and
>>> runs
>>> it against a mapping service as I described in the previous message.  I
>>> can
>>> easily imagine a GIS-based algorithm that finds "outliers" -- that is
>>> occurrence records that appear to be outside the distribution based on
>>> the
>>> occurrence records from other sources.  A clver/robust such algorithm
>>> could
>>> probably even discern whether the outlier likely represented a range
>>> extension (e.g. poorly-known species, plausible extansion), vs. a
>>> misidentification (e.g., well-known species and/or common
>>> misidentification).
>>>
>>> This would lead to a set of flagged records from the collection that
>>> might
>>> be misidentified.
>>>
>>> Rich
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> tdwg-content mailing list
>>> tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
>>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Pete DeVries
>> Department of Entomology
>> University of Wisconsin - Madison
>> 445 Russell Laboratories
>> 1630 Linden Drive
>> Madison, WI 53706
>> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
>> About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete DeVries
> Department of Entomology
> University of Wisconsin - Madison
> 445 Russell Laboratories
> 1630 Linden Drive
> Madison, WI 53706
> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
> About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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