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

Tony.Rees at csiro.au Tony.Rees at csiro.au
Fri Nov 26 01:11:17 CET 2010


Hi David, all,

It is also important to follow the trail of how the name information then gets passed on to other systems e.g. harvested into GNI etc. My impression is that currently, if dwc:scientificName holds a sciname without authorship and the latter information is put into dwc:scientificNameAuthor, then the version that is harvested into GNI (presuming that happens) loses the authority information, which is definitely a bad thing...

Cheers - Tony
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Remsen (GBIF) [mailto:dremsen at gbif.org]
> Sent: Thursday, 25 November 2010 8:00 PM
> To: Richard Pyle
> Cc: David Remsen (GBIF); Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart); m.doering at mac.com;
> Chuck.Miller at mobot.org; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; dmozzherin at eol.org
> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in
> DwCscientificName: good or bad?
> 
> > The thing that concerns me about 3a is the conditional definition of
> > scientificName (i.e., it excludes authorship when that information is
> > pre-parsed, but includes it when it's not pre-parsed).
> 
> right.  That is where we are today.  We need to test the contents
> every time.   One thing we are developing requirements for is a
> DarwinCore Archive "Normaliser" which would be a web service/web app
> client  that can accepted a DwC-A as input and would output the same
> data as a new DwC-A that conforms to a set of rules based on those
> requirements.  So one thing would be to parse the names into the
> authorship field for simpler consumption.
> 
> > The thing that concerns me about 3b is that scientificName is
> > (supposedly?)
> > required; so if someone with unparsed information provides
> > scientificNameWithAuthorship, then are they supposed to leave
> > scientificName
> > blank?
> 
> The short answer is yes,  they would leave it blank.  if they could
> parse it then they would have put the parts into name and author
> elements in the first place.   I also think the inverse is true.  If
> it is already split and they put it into name and author fields - they
> won't concatenate and put a new, merged copy into a name+authorship
> field.
> 
> In regard to the requirement confusion - either we keep
> dwc:scientificName alone and have a simple requirement test or we add
> a new term and make it a conditional requirement.  My point was,  if
> we add a new term,  then the set (scientificNameWithAuthorship,
> scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship) is more clear than
> (canonicalName, scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship)
> 
> DR
> 
> 
> >
> > Rich
> >
> >
> >



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