<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div><div>Pete - you just summed up much of where I left off in my just-sent post. If we can present those curating occurrence records with a comprehensive set of relevant concept options, ideally tied to reference publications like field guides, etc., we can support the use of concept identifiers in those records. That provides the basis for having some idea of the process by which they determined what name to use.</div><div><br></div><div>DR</div><br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div><br></div><div>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.</div> <div><div><br></div><div>- Pete<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Richard Pyle <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:deepreef@bishopmuseum.org">deepreef@bishopmuseum.org</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> <div> <div dir="ltr" align="left"><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"><span>What you're asking for would certainly be nice! But I was aiming more for what you described as "an improvement". Baby steps.... :-)</span></font></div> <div dir="ltr" align="left"><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"><span></span></font> </div> <div dir="ltr" align="left"><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"><span>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.</span></font></div> <div dir="ltr" align="left"><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"><span></span></font> </div> <div dir="ltr" align="left"><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"><span>Rich</span></font></div><br> <blockquote style="border-left:#0000ff 2px solid;padding-left:5px;margin-left:5px;margin-right:0px" dir="ltr"> <div dir="ltr" lang="en-us" align="left"> <hr> <font size="2" face="Tahoma"><div class="im"><b>From:</b> Peter DeVries [mailto:<a href="mailto:pete.devries@gmail.com" target="_blank">pete.devries@gmail.com</a>] <br></div><b>Sent:</b> Saturday, June 12, 2010 7:24 PM<br><b>To:</b> Richard Pyle<br><b>Cc:</b> David Remsen (GBIF); <a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a>; Kevin Richards; Jerry Cooper; dmozzherin; David Patterson<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking<br></font><br></div><div><div></div><div class="h5"> <div></div>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. <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br></div> <div>This needs to be made more scientific so that one can test what proportions of specimens actually conform to the description (concept).</div> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br></div> <div>These descriptions should be open, world readable and reference-able via a URI.</div> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br></div> <div>Respectfully,</div> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br></div> <div>- Pete</div> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br></div> <div>** 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.</div> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br></div> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br> <div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Richard Pyle <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:deepreef@bishopmuseum.org" target="_blank">deepreef@bishopmuseum.org</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote style="border-left:#ccc 1px solid;margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"> <div><font color="#0000ff" size="2" face="Arial"></font><br>> That said modeling relationships between taxonomic publications where<br>> the authors actually read the original species description, reviewed<br>> the type specimens, and thought about the actual species conscription is<br>appropriate.<br><br></div> <div>This is the sort of things the Meta-Authorities would take into account when<br>selecting a "follow-this-treatment" Usage-Instance for the preferred<br>treatment of a name.<br><br><br></div> <div>> Also consider that a large proportion of specimens are misidentified,<br>> and it occurs to me that modeling things like species occurrences as<br>> if they are Puma concolor (Linnaeus, 1771) sensu stricto is probably<br>> not appropriate. At best they are something like (Felis concolor /<br>> Puma concolor) with some significant level of error.<br><br></div> <div>GNA can't helpw ith that directly -- but it can help indirectly. Imagine a<br>service that takes ever specimen in a given collection's database, and runs<br>it against a mapping service as I described in the previous message. I can<br>easily imagine a GIS-based algorithm that finds "outliers" -- that is<br>occurrence records that appear to be outside the distribution based on the<br>occurrence records from other sources. A clver/robust such algorithm could<br>probably even discern whether the outlier likely represented a range<br>extension (e.g. poorly-known species, plausible extansion), vs. a<br>misidentification (e.g., well-known species and/or common<br>misidentification).<br><br>This would lead to a set of flagged records from the collection that might<br>be misidentified.<br><br>Rich<br><br><br></div>_______________________________________________<br>tdwg-content mailing list<br> <div><a href="mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org" target="_blank">tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org</a><br></div> <div> <div></div> <div><a href="http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content" target="_blank">http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content</a><br></div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>----------------------------------------------------------------<br>Pete DeVries<br>Department of Entomology<br>University of Wisconsin - Madison<br>445 Russell Laboratories<br>1630 Linden Drive<br>Madison, WI 53706<br>GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <br>About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base<br>------------------------------------------------------------<br></div></div></div></blockquote></div> </blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>----------------------------------------------------------------<br>Pete DeVries<br>Department of Entomology<br>University of Wisconsin - Madison<br>445 Russell Laboratories<br> 1630 Linden Drive<br>Madison, WI 53706<br>GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <br>About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base<br>------------------------------------------------------------<br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>