To complete the circle ...
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/tdwg/plants.html =
Plant Taxonomic Database Standards No. 3
greg
On 21 November 2010 19:58, Roderic Page r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk wrote:
This seems to be one of those threads where we seem hell bent on making things as complicated as possible.
I think Bob Morris was pointing out, in the vast majority of cases biologists use binomials without author names quite happily, and manage to get by just fine. To a first approximation nobody using any of the databases we construct will care about authorship. If they did, we'd be in trouble, because our databases represent this in various ways (comma after author name versus no comma), and some have invented spurious authorships based on chresonyms (that is, the "authorship" is someone who used the name, not the original author, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chresonym) .
For all the potential ambiguity, people will rely on naked scientific names, so it seems to me to be obvious that anybody exporting data in this area needs to provide a field that contains just the name. Failure to do this makes consuming the data harder than it needs to be, and that would be a mistake.
By all means add additional information in other fields, but doesn't
dwc:scientificName=Philander opossum dwc:scientificNameAuthorship=Linnaeus, 1758
pretty much cover what most people need? The vast majority of people consuming data will want just the name, so make that front and centre. The single most important value shouldn't be one people have to construct from the data.
Regards
Rod
Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
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