Thanks for the clarification, Dave.
Re "Scientific Name", as you hopefully see in the above document, the term in ITIS generally corresponds to what I see from the ICBN use (Art. 16-24)
and
the ICZN use (Art. 4-5 in particular, as the "combination" formation,
rather
than the more atomized uses like "specific name" which is like "epithet").
Yes, agreed.
There are of course other thing in ITIS with TSNs, like database
artifacts, that
are labeled as such and retained but hidden from most users to avoid confusion and not strand any user that might already have the TSN.
Yes, I didn't even want to bring those up -- I was just talking about the "legit" records.
As to the relationship to taxon concept, if you squinted your eyes "just
so"
you could qualify as Rich did above and suggest that those TSNs that
happen
to represent names with usage=valid/accepted (and preferably those with some level of verification indicated, vs. the legacy data we're still
dealing
with!) "essentially represent a taxon concept", but I don't really think
that is
appropriate at this point....
Fair enough.
I guess my point was that if you filter down to just those tsn's deemed to be valid/accepted, you end up with (ideally) a mosaic that covers the biodiversity landscape. That is, they ultimately are intended to represent a "preferred view" of taxon concept circumscriptions that collectively cover all within-scope biodiversity (allowing for the fact that it's not complete yet, and the scope may change). As such, those TSN's can be thought of as "representing" a taxon concept (as per the assertion of the pool of ITIS taxonomic experts).
Of the remaining TSN's, some apply to subjective/heterotypic junior synonyms that represent smaller taxon concept circumscriptions created by a splitter (when the ITIS expert was more of a lumper). Others apply to subjective/heterotypic junior synonyms that represent taxon concept circumscriptions congruent with the corresponding valid/accepted TSN-represented circumscription, in cases where a taxonomist established a name for a clear-cut taxon that already had an earlier name (unbeknownst to the later taxonomist). Others apply to the same specific epithet combined with a different genus epithet (same species epithet, different genus name, same or different taxon circumscription) -- that is, alternate combinations. Others apply to alternate spellings of the same genus/species combination, without known implications to concept circumscription relationship.
So the point is, in cases where [usage]="valid"|"accepted", then TSN can (I think) reasonably be taken (eyes squinted) as representative/proxy for a taxon concept circumscription; but for the other TSNs, the implications for taxon concepts are different, depending (in part) on the value of the [unaccept_reason] field.
actually the closest thing in ITIS to a "taxon concept" would be certain entries in the reference_links table (the intersection between the scientific names entries and the reference entries),
These are what I/GNUB would call "Taxon Name Usage" instances. And as you stated for TSNs, while such "TNUs" may be thought of as a proxy for a taxon concept, this only applies to a subset of all possible TNUs. Sort of like TSNs :-)
Aloha, Rich