Dear Rod,
Good points, we have extended the WoRMS webservice, and added the elements 'link' and 'fulltext' to the Source output object.
I guess my point is that the default map should not be uninterpretable to people like me who have trouble distinguishing red and green when used together (the EOL maps are equally bad, where as GBIF is much better.
Linking taxa to the original source reference (incl DOI/handle links and/or full texts if possible) is a priority in WoRMS, so I'm eager to look at more automated ways (if quality and citation completeness is acceptable).
Automation we can do, quality depends heavily on the original citation, which for older literature can be pretty messy. If by completeness you mean completeness of the citation record you'd want to add to WoRMS, I'd argue this matters less than identifiers, because if you have a DOI you can retrieve the citation at any time (albeit with a few caveats). Obsessing with citations is what got us in this mess in the first place ;)
Thanks.
Best regards
Ward
WoRMS/VLIZ
-----Original Message-----
From: Geoffrey Read [mailto:gread@actrix.gen.nz]
Sent: woensdag 7 december 2011 9:22
To: Roderic Page
Cc: taxacom; Ward Appeltans
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Finding your species in Mendeley
Hi Rod,
Fine. Tech points Ward's business. I only want to point out that you have
only the bare minimum ION shows you, which is very far from "this record
complete". You don't seem to have the hierarchy even, just the names, and
no authors. If Thompson Reuters was in the business of creating WoRMS-like
records like that one (not difficult just takes someone a bit of time), we
volunteer database workers could all fold our tents and get back to the
taxonomic coalface (sorry, mixed metaphors there). Although they wouldn't
be allowing free access, now would they? Perhaps it's good they don't then
(see below). Plus you've matched the doi perfectly to ION's record. Which
is indeed clever. Of course Thompson Reuters could provide that initially
if they wanted to - but I imagine doing that would adversely affect some
of their middle man services.
I like that ZooKeys is auto loading its new papers into the Species-Id
website. Ideally all taxonomy will be available structured like that, and
auto loadable into WoRMS and there would be little manual work for WoRMS
editors from the new pubs anymore.
Geoff
On Wed, December 7, 2011 7:43 pm, Roderic Page wrote:
On 7 Dec 2011, at 01:15, Geoffrey Read wrote:
Nice, but can't resist three comments:
1. It's great that this record has a DOI, but the same information doesn't
appear in the metadata for the LSID, which means the only way I could
extract this information from WoRMS is by screen scraping (yuck)
2. iTaxon already has this record complete with DOI
3. When will map makers learn about red-green colour blindness! I can't
see the red dot indicating the type locality unless I zoom in and the
green background momentarily disappears.