Rod, I think what you suggest goes well with existing DwC usage of scientificName
So having scientificName as any kind of a name and
Peter's suggestion of canonicalScientificName as a canonical form of the name
would pretty much solve the issue and be intuitive enough for people not to make mistakes normally.
@Rod: EOL uses canonical form as a title on species pages, it would be easy to add canonical forms to API I imagine.
Dima
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Roderic Page r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk wrote:
OK, a slightly less ranty take on this.
It seems to me there are a couple of "use cases" we need to tease apart.
If the goal is to digitise and aggregate (e.g., transcribe museum labels, aggregate from old museum databases) then ultimately yes, you take whatever people give you and clean it. Ideally you'd give people tools to clean stuff up before they serve it, but you try and make the barriers as low as possible.
But once you have that data for the love of God (oops, rant) don't simply repackage dirty data. What motivated my initial tweet was having to deal with a mess from the EOL API where names may or may not have authorities, depending in part upon what the source of the classification was. It's a mess, and I don't understand why people insist on serving this stuff.
So I guess my point is that if you're a primary provider (i,.e., you're the person or institution that digitised the original metadata) then you have an excuse, but if you are serving data you got from someplace else, give me canonical names.
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@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 Skype: rdmpage AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
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