You said that the "required" form would be ...
Actually, what I said was: " verbatimScientificName is the required field"; I didn't say anything about "required form" (see original post appended below). Right now, scientificName is (I think?) treated as a required field. My point was that verbatimScientificName should take on that role (along with the existing definition for scientificName), because *everyone* can provide a verbatim scientific name.
My second point was not part of a "required" form (as evidenced by my use of the word "should", no doubt much to the dismay of Bob Morris); it was a suggestion that for content holders with parsed data, the "required" element (verbatimScientificName) could easily be generated from the parsed bits.
If they don't have the authorship then they cannot output the "required"
form.
Again, if you read my post, you'll see that I never said anything about a "required form".
Yes. I should have written code in some of those as "Code".
Kind of like "Bible"
I wouldn't rely on capitalization alone to disambiguate (I know some programmers who would hold software Code at the biblical level). I think when mixing the terms in the same post, there should be a qualifier (like "nomenclatural" vs. "software"). Same goes for the unqualified word "name", which should NEVER, EVER, EVER be used in our community without some sort of qualifier ("canonical", "in the botanical sense", "in the zoological sense", "in the bacterial sense", "as a text string", etc.)
Aloha, Rich
=========================== On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote: I think this is *exactly* the right solution. I would go further to make it clear that:
- verbatimScientificName is the required field (with scientificName and scientificNameAuthorship as optional) - When a source database maintains separate fields corresponding to scientificName and scientificNameAuthorship, they should be concatenated (with a single space between them) to form the required verbatimScientificName
Aloha, Rich