My comments inline:
On 11/21/2010 4:58 AM, Roderic Page wrote:
This seems to be one of those threads where we seem hell bent on making things as complicated as possible.
It's probably more accurate to say that, for better or worse, there are multiple discussions going on. One set of issues relates to the DarwinCore representation of names, and at least one other has to do with use cases that will - arguably - require more semantic resolution than that offered by names. It seemed to me that Bob's comments touched upon both sets of issues.
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.
I think that's a contentious, and possibly not agenda-free, view. It reflects the "reluctance to go deeper" that I mentioned.
To a first approximation nobody using any of the databases we construct will care about authorship.
Also not necessarily a given, at least not in any of the major use cases that we struggled with in the SEEK project (e.g. predict future mammal species distributions in the Americas based on MaNIS records and climate modeling).
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).
As Peterson & Navarro-Sigüenza (1999) show in at least one restricted case, we are in trouble making inferences about conservation priorities based just on binomials.
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.
As an account of common practice the premise is accurate, and the conclusions based just on that premise are well taken too. But where's the other part that covers cases in which peoples' reliance on naked scientific names is problematic?
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.
In one of the most thorough analyses of this issue to date, Geoffroy and Berendsohn (2003) found that the name and concept of about 1500 German moss taxa remained stable in only 13.3% of the examined cases; spanning throughout a dozen treatments from 1927-2000. That's one of the most dramatic results from an essentially non-replicated study, but I find it hard to dismiss when we talk about named-based data labeling and integration.
Geoffroy, M., Berendsohn, W.G. 2003. The concept problem in taxonomy: importance, components, approaches. Schrift. Veget. 39, 5-14.
Regards,
Nico
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@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 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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