[tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwC scientificName: good or bad?

Sat Nov 20 22:45:18 CET 2010

What puzzles me about the highly taxonomically technical parts of
these threads is not that the codes of nomenclature seem difficult to
parse in the sense of formal languages---that's true of lots of
human-produced legislation.  It is that in 15 years of hanging out
with biologists, I have rarely heard them use anything other than
binomials in conversation about anything other than whether binomials
are adequate. Why, I wonder, are they not utterly confused during all
those other conversations, and if they are, does that mean that
conversations about biological topics can not advance biology? (This
seems unlikely to me, else why do they keep doing it?). Does it mean
that "only" hypotheses can come out of these discussions, but that
support for hypotheses can only come from data that is rigorously tied
delicate name formalisms?  It is hard to believe that only hypotheses
can be the subject of these conversations, except for the position
that everything in science is "only" hypothesis. But  maybe when the
amateurs leave the room, they suddenly start talking in  more
code-compliant names.

There are plenty of use cases--and successful information
systems---that don't depend on rigorous names.  Some aspects of
morphology form a simple example. For some uses, it is not a problem
to  illustrate what a sepal is with several  images of different taxa
which are either not named, inadequately named, or even incorrectly
named. Furthermore, this wouldn't change if those images were fetched
from a database in which it is impossible to decide which of those
name defects is in play, e.g. one in which there is nothing other than
binomials as names.

Another example I was personally party to was this conversation, from
memory, that  I was party to in Morocco a few years ago:

Bob Morris: Ooh, that's a beautiful cactus.
Kevin Thiele: It's a Euphorb, not a cactus.  There are no cacti here.
Bob: Why does it look like a cactus?
Kevin: It's pretty much the most successful way to deal with very dry
environments. But they are pretty distant from an phylogenetic point
of view.

Since most of the listeners were biologists, I imagine I was the only
one this was news to.  But what I don't believe is that some of the
party had a radically different understanding of the conversation than
I did.

So, the importance of code-compliant names not withstanding, I would
find it very interesting to see a resource devoted to use cases and
competency questions that are independent of them, along with
accompanying "not fit for use X" annotations. Sort of like warnings on
pharmaceutals.

Bob Morris

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Jim Croft <jim.croft at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a subtle difference in in the common but loosely expressed
> assertion of scientific names having (i.e. Including) authors and name
> components having authorship (which may or may not be displayed).
>
> Jim
>
> On Friday, November 19, 2010, John van Breda
> <john.vanbreda at biodiverseit.co.uk> wrote:
>> I'm coming in a bit late on this conversation so I hope I am not repeating
>> what has already been said, but botanical names can also have authorship at
>> both specific and infraspecific levels, e.g.
>> Centaurea apiculata Ledeb. ssp. adpressa (Ledeb.) Dostál
>>
>> And to make it even more complex, you can have subspecies variants, so 2
>> infraspecific levels, e.g.
>> Centaurea affinis Friv. ssp. affinis var. Affinis
>>
>> Atomising this properly could be quite complex but necessary to be able to
>> present the name as it should be written with italics in the correct place.
>> E.g. in the example above, the author string and rank strings are not
>> normally italiced, but the rest of the name is. Unless we can include this
>> formatting information in dwc:scientificName?
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> John
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org
>> [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of "Markus Döring
>> (GBIF)"
>> Sent: 19 November 2010 09:24
>> To: Roderic Page
>> Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; Jim Croft
>> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwC
>> scientificName: good or bad?
>>
>> What Darwin Core offers right now are 2 ways of expressing the name:
>>
>> A) the complete string as dwc:scientificName
>> B) the atomised parts:
>>     genus, subgenus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet,
>> verbatimTaxonRank (+taxonRank), scientificNameAuthorship
>>
>> Those 2 options are there to satisfy the different needs we have seen in
>> this thread - the consumers call for a simple input and the need to express
>> complex names in their verbatim form.
>> Is there really anything we are missing?
>>
>>
>>
>> When it comes to how its being used in the wild right now I agree with Dima
>> that there is a lot of variety out there.
>> It would be very, very useful if everyone would always publish both options
>> in a consistent way.
>>
>> Right now the fulI name can be found in once of these combinations:
>>  - scientificName
>>  - scientificName & scientificNameAuthorship
>>  - scientificName, taxonRank & scientificNameAuthorship
>>  - scientificName, verbatimTaxonRank & scientificNameAuthorship
>>  - genus, subgenus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet, taxonRank,
>> scientificNameAuthorship
>>  - genus, subgenus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet,
>> verbatimTaxonRank, scientificNameAuthorship
>>
>> To make matters worse the way the authorship is expressed is also
>> impressively rich of variants.
>> In particular the use of brackets is not always consistent. You find things
>> like:
>>
>> # regular botanical names with ex authors
>> Mycosphaerella eryngii (Fr. ex Duby) Johanson ex Oudem. 1897
>>
>> # original name authors not in brackets, but year is
>> Lithobius chibenus Ishii & Tamura (1994)
>>
>> # original name in brackets but year not
>> Zophosis persis (Chatanay), 1914
>>
>> # names with imprint years cited
>> Ctenotus alacer Storr, 1970 ["1969"]
>> Anomalopus truncatus (Peters, 1876 ["1877"])
>> Deyeuxia coarctata Kunth, 1815 [1816]
>> Proasellus arnautovici (Remy 1932 1941)
>>
>>
>> On Nov 19, 2010, at 8:50, Roderic Page wrote:
>>
>>> I'm with Jm. For the love of God let's keep things clean and simple.
>>> Have a field for the name without any extraneous junk (and by that I
>>> include authorship), and have a separate field for the name plus all
>>> the extra stuff. Having fields that atomise the name is also useful,
>>> but not at the expense of a field with just the name.
>>>
>>> Please, please think of data consumers like me who have to parse this
>>> stuff. There is no excuse in this day and age for publishing data that
>>> users have to parse before they can do anything sensible with it.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Rod
>>>
>>>
>>> On 19 Nov 2010, at 07:06, Jim Croft wrote:
>>>
>>>> Including the authors, dates and any thing else (with the exception of
>>>> the infraspecific rank and teh hybrid symbol and in botany) as part of
>>>> a thing called "the name" is an unholy abomination, a lexical
>>>> atrocity, an affront to logic and an insult the natural order of the
>>>> cosmos and any deity conceived by humankind.
>>>>
>>>> In botany at least, the "name" (which I take to be the basic
>>>> communication handle for a taxo
>
> --
> _________________
> Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~
> http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft
> 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
> of doubtful sanity.'
>  - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
>
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-- 
Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob at gmail.com
web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)