I believe that the position around these parts (which position I believe I have absorbed mainly by osmosis) is that a name is that thing comes into being with a nomenclatural act.
OK, then we're on the same page. This is what I've been calling a "Protonym", which, as I said in my earlier reply to Steve, means the taxonNameUsage isnatnce that represents the original establishment of a name.
Are all orthographic variants and misspellings different representations of the same "name" (object perspective);
Drat. Quite right - by what I have said above, orth vars refer to the same name as the correct spelling does. But the fact is that we have them in separate records with separate ids - what else can we do?
What I do is track individual usage instances of the orth vars, all anchored back to the protonym. Everything becomes easy if you can atomize things down to individual TNUs. The problem, of course, is that most datasets don't exist at that level of resolution.
Does this mean that our "name" records are not "name" records at all? Or that some are, some are not, and that some synonym types indicate not synonymy, but something different? Shall we distinguish between *taxonomic* synonymy (two names meaning the same taxon) and *foo* synonymy (two name strings meaning the same name)? "Nomenclatural synonymy" already means "two names having the same type specimen", so we can't call it that. But whatever we call it, it does seem that there's another layer of mapping. But what if the writer of a string had no specific idea they were using a homonym? Do we have "nominal name" as well as "nominal taxon"?
Like I said, it all becomes relatively straightforward if you can atomize all the way down to individual Taxon Name Usage instances (aka individual "Treatments" of taxon names).
For our data, a name record only contains elements that are part of the name. A record for a generic name will not contain a family name - the family that a genus is in is taxonomy. A taxon record has a name by way of a name id. In principle, it doesn't have any name strings in it at all. In practise, it contains data drawn from its name and from the names of its supertaxa. However, this data is not "primary" - it's a copy.
OK, got it. Thanks.
Aloha, Rich