Quoting Rich Pyle:
At this point, though, I really don't have a good sense for how best to proceed.
Aloha, Rich
Maybe an answer would be to use TCS not DwC for exchange of purely taxonomic data? How about creating a TCSA format for bulk transfer - or is this not a great thought... (not being that familiar with TCS)
One problem is that (e.g.) it is often desired to include some non-taxonomic information along with the names e.g. distribution/habitat codes, etc.
Just an idea, don't know if it solves the residual DwC issues anyway,
Cheers - Tony
-----Original Message----- From: Richard Pyle [mailto:deepreef@bishopmuseum.org] Sent: Thursday, 25 November 2010 11:56 AM To: 'Markus Döring' Cc: Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart); 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?
verbatimScientificName As I suggested in an earlier post, this would be "the complete set of textual elements useful for recognizing a unique scientific name", exactly as they appear in the original source.
yes for the definition, but Im not sure if removing scientificName from
the
dwc terms is a true option though. Its the most known term of all...
Yes, I know and agree. I figured I'd take a stab at the "ideal" world first, then curb back to reality... :-)
The problem is, scientificName as it currently is defined is not exactly the same thing as verbatimScientificName. The problem with scientificName is both its curse and its blessing. The liberal definition makes it very easy to accommodate from the perspective of the provider; but this same liberal definition *can* make it difficult for many clients. Many people do use it as a "verbatim" representation of a string blob in their database. Others generate "clean" concatenated name-string values from their parsed databases. Many, as Tony pointed out, do not include Authorship, even though they have Authorship information (as represented in scientificNameAuthorship). One golden rule of data management that I often tell people is that it's often better to be consistent, then correct. That is, something that's consistently incorrect can be corrected easily. But something that is inconsistently correct is often harder to deal with. In the case of scientificName, different people have different ideas of what "should be", but I think the only "correct" answer is the one described in the term definition.
uninomialNameElement Used for all names at the rank of genus and above; would also replace "genus" in DwC.
Genus will still be needed to represent the denormalised classification,
but
not for the parsed bits.
Right -- you mean in the sense of Family, Order, Class, etc. Personally, I think it would be "ideal" to eliminate these individual fields and just use dwc: higherClassification for this purpose. People with normalised data can represent it properly via parentNameUsage[ID] -- with the understanding that all names with a rank lower than genus would include the genus name as uninomial.
There's no elegant solution to this, as far as I can tell.
infragenericNameElement Better term for "subgenus".
Probably same is true for subgenus
I was just suggesting a better label for subgenus, so in this case it would mean exactly the same thing as subgenus does, just spelled differently. The reason the more general term is better than the rank-specific "subgenus" is to accommodate infrageneric Sections as well. Of course, we're screwed in the case where both a subgenus *and* a section are provide; but in that case I would be inclined to rely on a verbatim string to capture that.
At this point, though, I really don't have a good sense for how best to proceed.
Aloha, Rich