Hi David,
The problem is with the present DwC definition of scientificName- it is expected to contain authorship if the latter is available. (I presume Dima did the last upload into GNI so you could ask him what actually happens).
Cheers - Tony
-----Original Message----- From: David Remsen (GBIF) [mailto:dremsen@gbif.org] Sent: Friday, 26 November 2010 7:39 PM To: Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart) Cc: David Remsen (GBIF); deepreef@bishopmuseum.org; m.doering@mac.com; Chuck.Miller@mobot.org; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org; dmozzherin@eol.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwCscientificName: good or bad?
Tony
Why isn't this something the GNI would address? I don't see the problem with DwC. What is scientificNameAuthor supposed to be used for if it isn't to store the authorship information from a scientific name?
If we really need to make strict distinctions and can't deal with just the two name parts, then the logical new term needs to be scientificNameVerbatim or scientificNameWithAuthorship, not canonical name.
David
On Nov 26, 2010, at 1:11 AM, Tony.Rees@csiro.au Tony.Rees@csiro.au wrote:
Hi David, all,
It is also important to follow the trail of how the name information then gets passed on to other systems e.g. harvested into GNI etc. My impression is that currently, if dwc:scientificName holds a sciname without authorship and the latter information is put into dwc:scientificNameAuthor, then the version that is harvested into GNI (presuming that happens) loses the authority information, which is definitely a bad thing...
Cheers - Tony
-----Original Message----- From: David Remsen (GBIF) [mailto:dremsen@gbif.org] Sent: Thursday, 25 November 2010 8:00 PM To: Richard Pyle Cc: David Remsen (GBIF); Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart); m.doering@mac.com; Chuck.Miller@mobot.org; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org; dmozzherin@eol.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwCscientificName: good or bad?
The thing that concerns me about 3a is the conditional definition of scientificName (i.e., it excludes authorship when that information is pre-parsed, but includes it when it's not pre-parsed).
right. That is where we are today. We need to test the contents every time. One thing we are developing requirements for is a DarwinCore Archive "Normaliser" which would be a web service/web app client that can accepted a DwC-A as input and would output the same data as a new DwC-A that conforms to a set of rules based on those requirements. So one thing would be to parse the names into the authorship field for simpler consumption.
The thing that concerns me about 3b is that scientificName is (supposedly?) required; so if someone with unparsed information provides scientificNameWithAuthorship, then are they supposed to leave scientificName blank?
The short answer is yes, they would leave it blank. if they could parse it then they would have put the parts into name and author elements in the first place. I also think the inverse is true. If it is already split and they put it into name and author fields - they won't concatenate and put a new, merged copy into a name+authorship field.
In regard to the requirement confusion - either we keep dwc:scientificName alone and have a simple requirement test or we add a new term and make it a conditional requirement. My point was, if we add a new term, then the set (scientificNameWithAuthorship, scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship) is more clear than (canonicalName, scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship)
DR
Rich