Thank you, Gaurav, Rich & Greg!

   Really appreciate the detailed information, which will take some time to digest but is very helpful and concrete. I should note that my colleague Mike Rosenberg brought this up (you might be aware of this: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0101704); I was just fishing the TDWG waters for input - productively, as it turns out. Greg - those files are great - thanks! Personal opinion: not the first time that you & Australian colleagues are ahead of the pack.

   At a fairly high level, it does seems to me that if certain kinds of speaker intentions facilitate particular semantic integration services (or not so much), then finding a structured way to records these intentions may be worth exploring. For instance, could I possibly be the author of a biodiversity data paper where all TNUs are explicitly not "mine"? Or: how do I record a case where I say "our higher-level classification follows X", but then X's family-level concepts show up as paraphyletic on my phylogeny. Apparently I only followed X so much (at which point I 'said': "screw X, this is better").  All this might mean getting into taxonomists' business, which makes it ambitious.

Best, Nico


On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 4:47 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef@bishopmuseum.org> wrote:

Hi Nico,

 

I think it would be helpful to define a couple of terms first. I know you already know much of this, but for the benefit of other I think it would help set a baseline for convsersation.

[...] 

 

 

From: tdwg-content [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Nico Franz
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 12:19 PM
To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org; vocab@noreply.github.com
Subject: [tdwg-content] Taxonomic name usage files

 

Hi TDWG Content group:

 

   Perhaps someone can answer these question? Suppose I submitted a new biodiversity study to a journal for peer review and ultimately publication. My study mentions taxonomic names, but some names are used in more than one specific sense throughout the manuscript. As part of my study's data body, I want to say things like: at this point or these sections in my manuscript, I am using the name in the sense of authors X. And: later on in the Discussion, I am using the name in "my new sense" (as an example). I want to submit a table with structured metadata on the various usages of names in my manuscript, as part of the supplementary data provided to the Journal. I believe part of what the table would have to reflect, for each usage, is whether this is my usage, or that of someone else that I am ok with (=> define speaker role).

 

   Is there a best TDWG standard to glean terms and definitions from to draft up that table? I assume it is Darwin Core and/or the TCS, but then has someone actually tried this (= extract the subset of terms needed to identify names, usages, speaker roles) in conjunction with (e.g.) a biodiversity inventory or taxonomic revision to be published? The key purpose here would be to facilitate better name usage data practices, tied to the process of publishing new data via journals. To make data about name usages part of the supplementary data, in a structured and rather explicit format.

 

Thanks and best, 

 

Nico