Hi all,

The reason why I proposed a canonicalScientificName was to make it easier for data users.

As Tim Robertson points out [1], adding this term will probably make it more complicated, without much benefit. Gregor Hagedorn [2] explains that canonicalScientificName is not a solution for some edge cases (like hybrids) and infraspecific names without a rank marker don't mean much in botany. Rich Pyle [3] points out that more requests will probably be proposed (canonicalScientificNameWithoutRanks, canonicalScientificNameWithoutInfrageneric), demonstrated by Gregor's remark [2].

I now agree with all of these. The only thing I'd like to refine is the definition for genus [4], for which I issued a request: http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=151

See my argumentation in the link above. Basically: As I explained before (and Markus Döring before me), under the current definition the genus gets populated with the genus name of the accepted taxon for a synonym, while the specificEpithet and infraspecificEpithet are not. I think this is counter intuitive and confusing. I would populate it with the "genus name of the scientificName", which I think is how much people interpret it anyway. Advantages:

1. Agreeing with the refined definition for genus won't affect most of our applications and data (only for those who cared about putting the accepted genus for synonyms).

2. No new term canonicalScientificName.

3. Not need to update the useful definition for scientificName (verbose all the way if you can).

4. Publishers and aggregators *have the option* to provide an easier to use name via genus, specificEpithet and infraspecificEpithet. None of these have an authorship, so creating a canonicalScientificName under the proposed definition is as easy as TRIM(genus+" "+specificEpithet+" "+infraspecificEpithet).

5. The above statement only applies to genera, species and infraspecific taxa, but this is the bulk of our data. This method cannot be applied to infrageneric taxa and higher taxa, but as Rich pointed out [3], there are alternative methods for this.

6. Aggregators can ignore genus, specificEpithet and infraspecificEpithet for heterogenous networks and use parsers to deal with scientificNames. Stripping out the scientificNameAuthorship or using a simple regular expression won't sometimes be enough of course, e.g. "Calamagrostis stricta (Timm) Koeler subsp. stricta (Timm) Koeler var. borealis (Laestadius) Hartman" and those pesky hybrids. The good this is that once they have done the work, they can actually express that data in Darwin Core (see point 4).

7. Timon lepidus won't complain [5]. :-)

Regards,

Peter

[1] http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=150#c1

[2] http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/detail?id=150#c3

[3] http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-tag/2012-March/002487.html

[4] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#genus

[5] https://plus.google.com/114672072317054763788/posts/Nph2ksggNZW