There are current "official" TDWG standards for author names, publications, etc. See http://www.tdwg.org/standrds.html. Although these content standards are primarily botanical, they do stand as the current TDWG standards until repealed or amended.

In the 80s and 90s, particularly when TDWG was more botanical, TDWG tended to address data content standards. Data exchange structures have taken the forefront in the last several years, leaving data content dormant.

Now GUIDs may be bringing an old TDWG issue back into view. To envision a standard repository of common data values for publications and authors is to return to the TDWG discussions and goals of the 1980s, only now encompassing all organisms and not just botany. In the early times we had folks, like Brummitt and Powell, willing to invest years of time to compiling such data sources. Who would take on a similar data content compilation task for zoology, bacteriology, etc in order to make the TDWG data standards complete? Is the desire to have one master standardized list of all biological authors, publications, journals? And even more importantly, who would keep it up to date?

I think Remsen is describing his author list as a start on an "all-biology author" list, but Sally points out the peril in that given the original source of the botanical authors being at IPNI. And we haven't even gotten started. Certainly since many authors published in multiple organismal groups and many publications are also multiple organismal, without synthesis of the author and publication lists some duplication of GUIDs will inevitably occur. But, maybe the amount of this duplication falls outside what Richard Pyle called "90% of the value 90% of the time" (a quote I really like) and should just be accepted.

Chuck

-----Original Message----- From: Sally Hinchcliffe [mailto:S.Hinchcliffe@KEW.ORG] Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 10:50 AM To: TDWG-GUID@LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU Subject: Re: [TDWG-GUID] PublicationBank, Policy/Best Practice

Hi - regarding author names, I'm a little worried about duplication of effort here for botanical authors (plus fungal authors and other authors of algae and groups not included in the scope of IPNI proper) the authors served by IPNI cover the original Brummitt & Powell authors plus Harvard's Authors and it continues to be kept up to date and added to on a daily basis. The 'Brummitt & Powell' form is the TDWG standard for citing botanical authors.

I hope uBio aren't reinventing the wheel here ... we can certainly do more at IPNI to publicise this & to make web services and so on available but I would hate to think this data is being compiled and kept up to date in more than one place. See http://www.ipni.org/ipni/authorsearch?request_type=search&output_forma t=query&ret_defaults=on for the authors in IPNI

For publications we too, like many other databases that use publications and references, have a publications table that more or less covers electronically what BPH and Taxonomic Literature do on paper. This was compiled originally by Harvard. and is available at http://www.ipni.org/ipni/publicationsearch?request_type=search&output_ format=query&ret_defaults=on

I'd love for us to be tapping into some centrally available 'publication bank' that we could use in IPNI instead of our own internal lists & if this is web servicable would hopefully be looking to integrating it in via that rather than keeping copies of our own data.

Sally

Dear Dr. Huber: We are interested in being part of the conversation on PublicationBank.

One area we are interested in is the resolution of abbreviated and lexical forms of citations and I would think this would have to be a component of a more fundamental publicationBank resolution system. Issues of integrating citations have arisen in the digital conversion of taxonomic catalogs. We have successfully completed Nomenclator Zoologicus and are now working on Index Animalium. Resolving citations is a priority because it can identify high-impact candidates for future digital conversion, link different cited forms to a common source, and provide a foundation for referencing bibliographic components of taxonomic circumscriptions. Between the two sources we have over 800,000 citations references as a starting point. I know this issue is also of interest with our library colleagues at the Smithsonian.

We have a similar issue with author names annotating taxon names and have an web service in place for resolving them. At the moment this is populated primarily with botanical authors but as we post-process Sherborne and Neave we will likely be adding many thousands of zoological authors.

http://uio.mbl.edu/authors/info.php

Regards, David Remsen

On Feb 27, 2006, at 6:23 AM, Robert Huber wrote:

...

Dear all,

To my earlier email on PublicationBank I got no resonse, so I assume no earlier attempts or discussion on this topic have been started yet?

A pragmatic starting point for PublicationBank (PB)would be to use the literature entries of the existing LSID authorities databases to initially populate PB with GUIDs. To get the appropriate GUIDs we ideally would have access to services from the publishers, databases such as PubMed or the DOI foundation (crossref).

I called these services Bibliographic Query Resolver and just started to search the web for potential candidates. Results are here:

http://wiki.gbif.org/guidwiki/wikka.php? wakka=BibliographicQueryResolver

Bibliographic Query Resolver Accepts bibliographic meta-data and returns the corresponding GUID (e.g. DOI, LSID)

* CrossRef offers a variety of possibilities to resolve DOIs. More

information can be found at CrossRefs query spec pages. The DOI link directly redirects to the online document (subscription dependent) or abstract. * PudMed offers a 'Batch Citation Matcher' to retrieve a PMID which can be completed as LSID?

best regards, Robert

Dr. Robert Huber WDC-MARE / PANGAEA - www.pangaea.de, www.wdc-mare.org Stratigraphy.net - www.stratigraphy.net _____________________________________________ MARUM - Institute for Marine Environmental Sciences (location) University Bremen Leobener Strasse POP 330 440 28359 Bremen Phone ++49 421 218-65593, Fax ++49 421 218-65505 e-mail rhuber@@wdc-mare.org, robert.huber@stratigraphy.net

*** Sally Hinchcliffe *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708 *** S.Hinchcliffe@rbgkew.org.uk