... a much, much bigger use case for having linnean rank terms other than homonym disambiguation is actually fuzzy matching of misspelled canonicals!
On Nov 25, 2010, at 9:11, Markus Döring wrote:
the denormalised single Linnean Rank terms are very, very helpful for sharing occurrence data. They are the primary means to distinguish between homonyms when only a canonical name is given. And they are found in many denormalised sources like spreadsheets. No doubt these are needed!
And yes, dwc:genus and dwc:subgenus according to the definition is for the *classification*, not the parsed name (even though this is mostly the same).
As far as I can tell the dwc changes we are discussing are still the same. Either:
A) add a canonicalName term or B) add an atomised term for genus/uninomial + infrageneric/uninomial
I think both options are a way to go. A single canonical name if given correctly is very straight forward to parse, so personally I think this is easier than having multiple terms. For the name part terms I think I would agree with Chuck that a single uninomial can be used for genus or infrageneric ranks. As a canonical binomial would *not* include a subgenus or section, there is not need to have that parsed information as a term. In case the scientificname actually IS the subgenus, the uninomial can be used.
Markus
On Nov 25, 2010, at 8:36, David Remsen (GBIF) wrote:
Rich
Your two statements below don't jibe well in this case. Putting random concatenations of higher taxa into dwc:higherClassification would make for a real mess. Having only the basic named Linnaean ranks does ignore all of the intermediate ranks but it supports conformity at least for those in a way that higherClassification cannot as you lose the associated rank term. It also supports what I think is a fairly substantial bloc of data that exists in a denormal form with only (or nearly only) the basic Linnaean ranks in named rank columns. Concatenating these into dwc:higherClassification would be lossy in this case.
My real concern, however, would be in trying to subsequently line up multiple datasets where there were omissions in some higher ranks so that the concatenations were abbreviated. In other words
Bivalvia:Mytildae:Mytilus edulis Mollusca:Mytiloidea:Mytilus: Mytilus edulis Animalia: Mollusca:Mytiloidea:Mytildae:Mytilus: Mytilus edulis
See http://code.google.com/p/gbif-ecat/wiki/Nom5ExampleMytilusedulis for a real world example and, ignoring the other inherent messes, imagine trying to deal with this with no higher rank columns for context and all those nulls removed (no fair keeping the delimiters for them either).
DR
On 25/11/2010, at 11:56 AM, Richard Pyle wrote:
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.
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.
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content