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

[greg whitbread]

To complete the circle ...

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/tdwg/plants.html  =

Plant Taxonomic Database Standards No. 3

greg

On 21 November 2010 19:58, Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
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> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>
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--
Greg Whitbread
Australian National Botanic Gardens
Australian National Herbarium
+61 2 62509482
ghw at anbg.gov.au