Not enough time to respond in full, but one comment:

I am more reserved about demands to provide a central registry for taxon concepts (or "derived/secondary" taxon concepts, if the nomenclatural act of creating a name itself is considered a taxon concept as well):

My solution to this, which I will describe in more detail in my presentation at TDWG, is to assign the GUID to every "Name+Reference" instance ("Reference" here defined broadly; not restricted to publications). A susbset of these instances will be "name-bearing" instances (i.e., "original taxonomic descriptions"), recursively serving as the "Name" part of the Name+Reference instances. Another (overlapping) susbset of these would be "concept-bearing" instances. Still others may simply be specimen determination labels. They all represent a documented use of a taxonomic name by a human (or set of humans). The idea is that taxonomic names do not exist outside of a usage context, and that the usage context is usually objectively discernable and "reusable" (and as such, well-suited for shared universal GUID assigment). Keeping it broad and simple like this allows the same GUID pool to be used for a variety of applications (handles to names and concepts, for the purposes of constructing nomenclatural synonymies, mapping concepts, applying names/concepts to specimens, etc.)

Must....get....some....sleep.....

Aloha, Rich

Richard L. Pyle, PhD Natural Sciences Database Coordinator, Bishop Museum 1525 Bernice St., Honolulu, HI 96817 Ph: (808)848-4115, Fax: (808)847-8252 email: deepreef@bishopmuseum.org http://www.bishopmuseum.org/bishop/HBS/pylerichard.html