I certainly sympathise with the desire for a readily-consumed naked scientific name field.  However, unless the canonicalScientificName element is enforced as a mandatory field (which would in itself impact some data publishers and may prevent them validly sharing their data without extra work to provide clean scientific names), it will be yet another element which data consumers must check.  If canonicalScientificName is supplied, consumers will still need to handle cases where it is malformed.  If is not supplied, they will need to ignore the record or else do precisely what they do today with the scientificName field.  

I therefore worry that adding this field could in fact make the task more complex, rather than simpler, for data consumers.

Thanks,

Donald

 

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Donald Hobern - GBIF Director - dhobern@gbif.org

Global Biodiversity Information Facility http://www.gbif.org/

GBIF Secretariat, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark

Tel: +45 3532 1471  Mob: +45 2875 1471  Fax: +45 2875 1480

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