Dear Steve et al.:
I would've phrased it more or less like this:
2. The names (example: Curculio L.) are labels (!) that denote one or more concept labels (example: 1. Curculio L. sec. Linnaeus, 1758 and 2. Curculio L. sec. Pelsue & O'Brien, 2010).
1. The concepts are something like this (from Franz & Peet, 2009): A taxonomic concept is the underlying meaning, or referential extension, of a scientific name as stated by a particular author in a particular publication. It represents the author’s full-blown view of how the name reaches out to observed or unobserved objects in nature (beyond statements about type specimens). It is a direct reflection of what has been written, illustrated, and deposited by a taxonomist, regardless of his or her theoretical orientation.Taxonomic concepts are labelled using the abbreviation ‘sec.’ for the Latin secundum, or ‘according to’ (Berendsohn, 1995). The ‘sec.’ is preceded by the full Linnaean name and followed by the specific author and publication, as in Andropogon virginicus L. sec. Radford et al. (1968), an earlier concept, versus Andropogon virginicus L. sec.Weakley (2006), which is a later and narrower concept. The consistent practice of handling a taxonomic name only in connection with a specific source makes it possible to trace the evolution of its multiple meanings through time.
So according to this (debatable) view, two things are perhaps most important: (1) by using a fairly rigorous name + reference approach to recognizing concepts, you can have a lot of concepts (inflation) that point to the same set of biological individuals (referring back to your words) but are nevertheless separate as data entities, even if their meanings are aparently congruent. So (2) in that sense the "concept" is not the set of individuals (past, present, future) - that would be the taxon, I presume. The concept is more like a perspective of what the taxon is or might be - and always according to a particular author and reference. Identification differ, in my mind, from this mainly because the identifier makes no strong claim about challenging a published concepts or authoring a new one.
3. It seems that name usage and what I call above taxon concept label are close to synonymous (?).
Respectfully,
Nico
Nico M. Franz Department of Biology University of Puerto Rico Call Box 9000 Mayagüez, PR 00681-9000
Phone: (787) 832-4040, ext. 3005 Fax: (787) 834-3673 E-mail: nico.franz@upr.edu Website: http://academic.uprm.edu/~franz/
On 11/1/2010 1:33 PM, Steve Baskauf wrote:
Paul, Rich, et al. [...] In general, I have come to understand the following:
- There are taxon concepts, which I guess represents a particular
circumscription of individuals. The taxon concept is the result of some kind of rule that allows one to decide whether particular individuals should be included in that taxon or not. The set of all biological individuals that are included are the actual concept (or maybe not?). 2. There are taxon names, which have been published for the purpose of identifying taxa. 3. There are taxon name usages, which are a sort of node that connects a name with a concept. If I'm getting Rich right, this is the resource to which dwc:Identifications should be tied. Rich also suggested that taxon name usages might be instances of the dwc:Taxon class. Although these three types of resources aren't all defined as "classes" in Darwin Core, it seems to me that they are classes in the "RDF sense" (i.e. that their instances can be typed to them).
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So is this anything close to reality? Steve
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