[tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

[Peter DeVries]

Whoops, did I say most? That was probably an overstatement.. sorry!

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
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 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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