I guess what I don't understand is: what would go in scientificNameWithAuthorship that isn't already achievable via these three terms:
verbatimScientificName (any text string purporting to represent as unambiguously as possible a scientific name, inclusive of authorship if available) scientificName (effectively canonical name explicitly without authorship = your scientificNameWithoutAuthorship) scientificNameAuthorship (only the authorship; no scientific name elements)
Give me a use case where one would want to use something like scientificNameWithAuthorship in a way that couldn't be served by these three elements.
The only one I can think of is the case where the original verbatim name-string for the record is a mis-spelling of an autonym (and the provider wanted to represent the mis-spelling in verbatimScientificName). In that case, the onus would be on the consumer to generate the correct autonym form, with authorship after the species epithet, rather than after the infraspecific epithet. This seems like a rare use case to me. There are *plenty* of rare use cases out there that DwC does not accommodate, so I don't see that as justification for introduction of a new term, that might further confuse people. Moreover, it seems like a very simple algorithm for a consumer to recognize an autonym (nomenclaturalCode=ICBN + Rank is below species + second two components of trinomial are identical), and then format the string accordingly from scientificName and scientificNameAuthorship.
I *STRONGLY* disagree with your suggestion to drop scientificNameAuthorship. This is an extremely fundamental component to nomenclatural disambiguation, and a relative "pain in the parse" for a consumer when provided only with a full name-string-with-authorship. To me, the use cases where your suggested scientificNameWithAuthorship cannot be easily met with a combination of verbatimScientificName , scientificName, and scientificNameAuthorship are far, far, far fewer than the use cases that would benefit from receiving content where authorship is pre-parsed from canonical name.
Aloha, Rich
-----Original Message----- From: Gregor Hagedorn [mailto:g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 10:26 AM To: Richard Pyle; Markus Döring; David Remsen (GBIF) Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] proposed term: dwc:verbatimScientificName
About the problem of author strings in the middle of the scientific names
in
autonyms: Perhaps the debate is argued too much from the providers side. My proposal to add a scientificNameWithAuthorship is based on consumer use cases.
verbatimScientificName is meant to give the consumer no guarantee whatever on what form the name has. This is good, because it guarantees that a maximum of records can be served from providers having no guarantees themselves. However, it does not allow the consuming applications or services to make decisions.
I believe the majority of a consumers either need a scientificNameWithoutAuthorship (output policy, name-matching policy) or a scientificNameWithAuthorship (unambiguous name representation policy, name-matching policy).
The latter use case cannot be served with the modification following Markus's and David's proposal. This means that every service intending to match or display unambiguous name strings with authors needs to do parsing. Furthermore, providers that know that they have canonical
scientific
names with authorship cannot transmit information about this fact.
I even doubt, whether the use cases for an isolated scientificNameAuthorship string are very frequent (although they certainly exist). I therefore propose to emend DwC with:
verbatimScientificName scientificNameWithoutAuthorship (which might continued to be called scientificName) scientificNameWithAuthorship
and drop the scientificNameAuthorship to reduce complexity.
Gregor