I don't think that's right. Names are pointers to species concepts, but are not concepts themselves. A label for a species concept would look like "Aus bus sensu Author/Citation" or "Aus bus sec. Author/Citation". Also, of course, the name is not, in itself, a unique identifier (in something like 10% of cases -- which in my mind is non-trivial).
Also, I disagree with the idea that Aedes triseriatus and Ochlerotatus triseriatus necessarily refer to different taxon concepts. To me, the "concept" is the circumscribed set of organisms. If I curcumscribe a set of organisms that I label with "Aedes triseriatus", and then later decide that this set of organisms is best classified in the genus Ocherotatus, then naming it as such does not change the circumscribed set of organisms. It certainly may have implications on the concepts for the genera "Aedes" and "Ochlerotatus", but in my mind, it has no effect on the implied circumscription (=Concept, sensu me) of what is indicated by the species epithet "triseriatus".
I do not think it makes sense to include hierarchical clasification as part of the terminal taxon "concept". Taxa at each hierarchical rank are, in my mind, defined by their contents; not their higher classification.
The way I visualize it, there is a many:many relationship between names and concepts (I *think* this applies no matter what you mean by "name", and no matter what you mean by "concept"). The same circumscription of organisms can be labelled by many different names, and the same name may apply to many different circumscriptions of organisms (not just homonyms/homographs, but also lumper/splitter issues).
Therefore, I don't think it is appropriate to try to equate names:concepts as 1:1, or even many:1.
Aloha, Rich
P.S. I certainly think that "Aedes triseriatus" and "Ochlerotatus triseriatus" are different "things", just not (necessarily) different taxon concepts. Actually, from an informatics perspective, I think that treating these different combinations as unique/identified objects doesn't gain us much. I think it's *MUCH* more robust to parse out the different individual usages of each combination as the identified objects, then derive the unique combinations/spellings/etc. from those usages. If the notion of indexing usages seems too intimidating, then start with the easy ones -- like the original useages of each of the name elements ("Aedes", "Ochlerotatus", and "triseriatus"), and the key treatments (e.g., whoever first combined "triseriatus" with the genus "Ochlerotatus", and/or whoever robustly defined alternate concepts for each).
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From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Peter DeVries Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 9:38 AM To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking
I was looking through the latest DarwinCore and comments related to the TaxonConceptID.
Since the name serves as both a unique identifier and a phylogenetic hypothesis, you are effectively saying that observations labeled
Aedes triseriatus
and
Ochlerotatus triseriatus
Are separate species concepts, and should therefore be treated as separate things.
i.e. The name is the concept.
Also since there are several name variants for each "species", how do you distinguish which of these nameID's are the same species and which are different?
- Pete
---------------------------------------------------------------- Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 GeoSpecies Knowledge Base About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base ------------------------------------------------------------