According to our experience in this matter with content providers, I fully support Donald's point of view and worries on this point.
with my best wishes
Patricia
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Donald Hobern dhobern@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Peter.
I certainly sympathise with the desire for a readily-consumed naked scientific name field. However, unless the canonicalScientificName element is enforced as a mandatory field (which would in itself impact some data publishers and may prevent them validly sharing their data without extra work to provide clean scientific names), it will be yet another element which data consumers must check. If canonicalScientificName is supplied, consumers will still need to handle cases where it is malformed. If is not supplied, they will need to ignore the record or else do precisely what they do today with the scientificName field.
I therefore worry that adding this field could in fact make the task more complex, rather than simpler, for data consumers.
Thanks,
Donald
Donald Hobern - GBIF Director - dhobern@gbif.org
Global Biodiversity Information Facility http://www.gbif.org/
GBIF Secretariat, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
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