On Jun 10, 2010, at 10:09 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:

Hi Richard

You are agreeing with me.

My point is that the DarwinCore should include an identifier that resolves to a site that provides some information about how that concept is defined.

Wouldn't the taxonConceptID provide that?

1) First by mapping the concept to the various names and related identifiers

2) By providing additional information that helps one determine if a specimen is a close match to that species concept.

What sort of additional information? Literature, specimens, and descriptions can be included even using the text guidelines as we have done. There must be even more detailed ways to do it. These are tied to the taxonID which could be linked to a resolvable taxon concept ID.

The field nameAccordingTo does not provide this kind of information.

- Pete

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef@bishopmuseum.org> wrote:

I don't think that's right. Names are pointers to species concepts, but are not concepts themselves. A label for a species concept would look like "Aus bus sensu Author/Citation" or "Aus bus sec. Author/Citation". Also, of course, the name is not, in itself, a unique identifier (in something like 10% of cases -- which in my mind is non-trivial).

Also, I disagree with the idea that Aedes triseriatus and Ochlerotatus triseriatus necessarily refer to different taxon concepts.

I agree with Rich here. The two names themselves can only be inferred to refer to the same type. In a given instance they could either be used to refer to the same or a different concept. I would think that this must be true for any binomial combination referring to the same type. On the other hand, names referring to different types could not validly refer to the same concept if my current late night thinking is correct. A circumscription that includes multiple types must follow a set of rules to determine the name.

To me, the "concept" is the circumscribed set of organisms. If I curcumscribe a set of organisms that I label with "Aedes triseriatus", and then later decide that this set of organisms is best classified in the genus Ocherotatus, then naming it as such does not change the circumscribed set of organisms. It certainly may have implications on the concepts for the genera "Aedes" and "Ochlerotatus", but in my mind, it has no effect on the implied circumscription (=Concept, sensu me) of what is indicated by the species epithet "triseriatus".

I do not think it makes sense to include hierarchical clasification as part of the terminal taxon "concept". Taxa at each hierarchical rank are, in my mind, defined by their contents; not their higher classification.

I also agree with Rich here. A concept shouldn't change based on how it is categorized.

The way I visualize it, there is a many:many relationship between names and concepts (I *think* this applies no matter what you mean by "name", and no matter what you mean by "concept"). The same circumscription of organisms can be labelled by many different names, and the same name may apply to many different circumscriptions of organisms (not just homonyms/homographs, but also lumper/splitter issues).

Therefore, I don't think it is appropriate to try to equate names:concepts as 1:1, or even many:1.

Aloha,

Rich

P.S. I certainly think that "Aedes triseriatus" and "Ochlerotatus triseriatus" are different "things", just not (necessarily) different taxon concepts. Actually, from an informatics perspective, I think that treating these different combinations as unique/identified objects doesn't gain us much. I think it's *MUCH* more robust to parse out the different individual usages of each combination as the identified objects, then derive the unique combinations/spellings/etc. from those usages. If the notion of indexing usages seems too intimidating, then start with the easy ones -- like the original useages of each of the name elements ("Aedes", "Ochlerotatus", and "triseriatus"), and the key treatments (e.g., whoever first combined "triseriatus" with the genus "Ochlerotatus", and/or whoever robustly defined alternate concepts for each).

From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Peter DeVries
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 9:38 AM
To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: [tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

I was looking through the latest DarwinCore and comments related to the TaxonConceptID.

Since the name serves as both a unique identifier and a phylogenetic hypothesis, you are effectively saying that observations labeled

Aedes triseriatus

and

Ochlerotatus triseriatus

Are separate species concepts, and should therefore be treated as separate things.

i.e. The name is the concept.

Also since there are several name variants for each "species", how do you distinguish which of these nameID's are the same species and which are different?

- Pete

----------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
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--
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
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