What puzzles me about the highly taxonomically technical parts of these threads is not that the codes of nomenclature seem difficult to parse in the sense of formal languages---that's true of lots of human-produced legislation. It is that in 15 years of hanging out with biologists, I have rarely heard them use anything other than binomials in conversation about anything other than whether binomials are adequate. Why, I wonder, are they not utterly confused during all those other conversations, and if they are, does that mean that conversations about biological topics can not advance biology? (This seems unlikely to me, else why do they keep doing it?). Does it mean that "only" hypotheses can come out of these discussions, but that support for hypotheses can only come from data that is rigorously tied delicate name formalisms? It is hard to believe that only hypotheses can be the subject of these conversations, except for the position that everything in science is "only" hypothesis. But maybe when the amateurs leave the room, they suddenly start talking in more code-compliant names.
There are plenty of use cases--and successful information systems---that don't depend on rigorous names. Some aspects of morphology form a simple example. For some uses, it is not a problem to illustrate what a sepal is with several images of different taxa which are either not named, inadequately named, or even incorrectly named. Furthermore, this wouldn't change if those images were fetched from a database in which it is impossible to decide which of those name defects is in play, e.g. one in which there is nothing other than binomials as names.
Another example I was personally party to was this conversation, from memory, that I was party to in Morocco a few years ago:
Bob Morris: Ooh, that's a beautiful cactus. Kevin Thiele: It's a Euphorb, not a cactus. There are no cacti here. Bob: Why does it look like a cactus? Kevin: It's pretty much the most successful way to deal with very dry environments. But they are pretty distant from an phylogenetic point of view.
Since most of the listeners were biologists, I imagine I was the only one this was news to. But what I don't believe is that some of the party had a radically different understanding of the conversation than I did.
So, the importance of code-compliant names not withstanding, I would find it very interesting to see a resource devoted to use cases and competency questions that are independent of them, along with accompanying "not fit for use X" annotations. Sort of like warnings on pharmaceutals.
Bob Morris
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Jim Croft jim.croft@gmail.com wrote:
There is a subtle difference in in the common but loosely expressed assertion of scientific names having (i.e. Including) authors and name components having authorship (which may or may not be displayed).
Jim
On Friday, November 19, 2010, John van Breda john.vanbreda@biodiverseit.co.uk wrote:
I'm coming in a bit late on this conversation so I hope I am not repeating what has already been said, but botanical names can also have authorship at both specific and infraspecific levels, e.g. Centaurea apiculata Ledeb. ssp. adpressa (Ledeb.) Dostál
And to make it even more complex, you can have subspecies variants, so 2 infraspecific levels, e.g. Centaurea affinis Friv. ssp. affinis var. Affinis
Atomising this properly could be quite complex but necessary to be able to present the name as it should be written with italics in the correct place. E.g. in the example above, the author string and rank strings are not normally italiced, but the rest of the name is. Unless we can include this formatting information in dwc:scientificName?
Regards
John
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of "Markus Döring (GBIF)" Sent: 19 November 2010 09:24 To: Roderic Page Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org; Jim Croft Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwC scientificName: good or bad?
What Darwin Core offers right now are 2 ways of expressing the name:
A) the complete string as dwc:scientificName B) the atomised parts: genus, subgenus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet, verbatimTaxonRank (+taxonRank), scientificNameAuthorship
Those 2 options are there to satisfy the different needs we have seen in this thread - the consumers call for a simple input and the need to express complex names in their verbatim form. Is there really anything we are missing?
When it comes to how its being used in the wild right now I agree with Dima that there is a lot of variety out there. It would be very, very useful if everyone would always publish both options in a consistent way.
Right now the fulI name can be found in once of these combinations: - scientificName - scientificName & scientificNameAuthorship - scientificName, taxonRank & scientificNameAuthorship - scientificName, verbatimTaxonRank & scientificNameAuthorship - genus, subgenus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet, taxonRank, scientificNameAuthorship - genus, subgenus, specificEpithet, infraspecificEpithet, verbatimTaxonRank, scientificNameAuthorship
To make matters worse the way the authorship is expressed is also impressively rich of variants. In particular the use of brackets is not always consistent. You find things like:
# regular botanical names with ex authors Mycosphaerella eryngii (Fr. ex Duby) Johanson ex Oudem. 1897
# original name authors not in brackets, but year is Lithobius chibenus Ishii & Tamura (1994)
# original name in brackets but year not Zophosis persis (Chatanay), 1914
# names with imprint years cited Ctenotus alacer Storr, 1970 ["1969"] Anomalopus truncatus (Peters, 1876 ["1877"]) Deyeuxia coarctata Kunth, 1815 [1816] Proasellus arnautovici (Remy 1932 1941)
On Nov 19, 2010, at 8:50, Roderic Page wrote:
I'm with Jm. For the love of God let's keep things clean and simple. Have a field for the name without any extraneous junk (and by that I include authorship), and have a separate field for the name plus all the extra stuff. Having fields that atomise the name is also useful, but not at the expense of a field with just the name.
Please, please think of data consumers like me who have to parse this stuff. There is no excuse in this day and age for publishing data that users have to parse before they can do anything sensible with it.
Regards
Rod
On 19 Nov 2010, at 07:06, Jim Croft wrote:
Including the authors, dates and any thing else (with the exception of the infraspecific rank and teh hybrid symbol and in botany) as part of a thing called "the name" is an unholy abomination, a lexical atrocity, an affront to logic and an insult the natural order of the cosmos and any deity conceived by humankind.
In botany at least, the "name" (which I take to be the basic communication handle for a taxo
-- _________________ Jim Croft ~ jim.croft@gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~ http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft 'A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.' - Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
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