Hi Everyone,

Can I hope to summarize the GUID debate with regard to TaxonNames and TaxonConcepts and suggest a way forward? (This borrows from Rod's post and various conversations with others)
  1. We have two kinds of GUID (one for TaxonNames and one for TaxonConcepts).
  2. Anyone can set up a system issuing either type of GUID.
  3. Big central initiatives (nomenclators like IPNI & ZooBank) will issue TaxonName GUIDs but they will not have a monopoly on these enforced by the system.
  4. 'sensible' taxonomists and institutions will generate TaxonConcept GUIDs for the concepts they want to broadcast. Each of these TaxonConcepts will refer to a TaxonName held in a major nomenclator (using it's GUID). They may also refer to other TaxonConcepts from other institutions and their own via GUIDs.
  5. Indexers and users of the system can crawl the graph of TaxonConcept relationships (for query expansion etc) but they know that the vast majority of concepts should be linked to a GUID generated by the major nomenclators. The indexer does not have to string match to try and figure out how the TaxonConcepts are related (i.e. whether they are different delimitations of the same name).
  6. Not so sensible taxonomists and institutions will not refer to a major nomenclator. Their TaxonConcepts will be difficult to relate to others globally.
  7. If nomenclators do not do their job well they could, theoretically, be replaced by some one else setting one up.
The important thing to note here is it doesn't matter what a name is! All the nomenclatural stuff is up to the nomenclator and not the GUID system. If, for example, ZooBank decided it wouldn't issue GUIDs for new combinations and it did not meet the needs of the community then the community would be free to set up another nomenclator or try and force ZooBank to change. Likewise IPNI and autonyms or whatever. But all these discussions about gender, spelling etc are separate from the GUID issues. Basically the taxonomist would go to the nomenclator and say "I want to describe something you haven't issued a GUID for."  Either the nomenclator would issue the GUID or the taxonomist would have to start a revolution to get something changed.

So debates about what the nomenclators issue GUIDs for can spin out to the relevant nomenclator lists (does ZooBank have one yet?).

The second important thing to note is that no one is forced to do anything. If people don't like a nomenclator or system they can simply go their own way so there is no restriction on scientific freedom or anything.

There is a great deal to flesh out on this but is it something we could agree on as a basic plan?

If people don't object to this line of progression I could make up a page on the wiki that looks like we have agreed on it and we could spin out to discuss things like how we differentiate between name and concept GUIDs, central services for issuing GUIDs for those who may not want to run the resolution thing, what you get back in the meta data  etc etc.

All the best,

Roger

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 Roger Hyam
 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
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 http://www.tdwg.org
 roger@tdwg.org
 +44 1578 722782
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