Two quick comments:

On 16 Nov 2005, at 12:04, Richard Pyle wrote:

I would point out that within the "TaxonName" flavor, there may be "subflavors" like "Basionym", "New Combination", and "Orthographic Variant" -- just as within the TaxonConcept flavor there are "Original", "Revision", "Nominal", etc. subflavors. (Apologies for my Amerikanized spelling...)

Before we have a flurry of name flavours (yuck), I'd suggest that many of these "flavours" are really relationships between names, e.g. "Physeter catadon" is a misspelling of "Physeter catodon". Hence, I'd argue for having GUIDs for these two name strings, and in the metadata for one name have something like

<isMisspellingOf rdf:resource="urn:lsid:authority:namespace:123" />

Hence, I think before we embark on adding complexity, why not have GUIDs for names and then specify relationships between these names? This is what I've been doing with the LSIDs we serve here.

We could do with an ontology for these relationships so that, for example, if somebody asks for the synonyms of name "x", and two names are linked by the relationship "isBasionymOf" we recover that relationship (in other words, our tools know that 'isBasionymOf" is a kind of synonym).

Again, let's try and keep things simple.

This leads to a much more general topic, but I think if we adopt RDF for our metadata we gain a lot of query and inference tools "for free." GUIDs by themselves are boring, it's the metadata that matters.

My general feeling is that most of the useful information is metadata, the only candidates for data (in my mind) being the literal text string (NameString), a ref pointer to a defined Documentation instance (if any), and perhaps position information (e.g. page) within the Documentation instance. All of these might be intially recorded in error, but could be corrected via the LSID revision id (version).

I think everything about a name probably is metadata, and doing this opens up the possibility of doing useful things with that metadata (see above). In the LSID stuff we've been doing at Glasgow the only time we provide data is if we are serving images, in which case it makes sense to serve a stream of bytes (e.g., a TIFF image). In one sense, data isn't that interesting (or, put another way in many cases it requires a person to make sense of it, whereas computers can handle metadata).

Regards

Rod

------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom

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