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

Roderic Page r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Sun Nov 21 09:58:24 CET 2010


This seems to be one of those threads where we seem hell bent on  
making things as complicated as possible.

I think Bob Morris was pointing out, in the vast majority of cases  
biologists use binomials without author names quite happily, and  
manage to get by just fine. To a first approximation nobody using any  
of the databases we construct will care about authorship. If they did,  
we'd be in trouble, because our databases represent this in various  
ways (comma after author name versus no comma), and some have invented  
spurious authorships based on chresonyms (that is, the "authorship" is  
someone who used the name, not the original author, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chresonym) 
.

For all the potential ambiguity, people will rely on naked scientific  
names, so it seems to me to be obvious that anybody exporting data in  
this area needs to provide a field that contains just the name.  
Failure to do this makes consuming the data harder than it needs to  
be, and that would be a mistake.

By all means add additional information in other fields, but doesn't

dwc:scientificName=Philander opossum
dwc:scientificNameAuthorship=Linnaeus, 1758

pretty much cover what most people need? The vast majority of people  
consuming data will want just the name, so make that front and centre.  
The single most important value shouldn't be one people have to  
construct from the data.

Regards

Rod



---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

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