On 19 Sep 2005, at 12:59, Michael Malicky wrote:

ad. 3)

Just a simple statement, as Peter already pointed out, by using Linnean code carefully and with high quality within our databases, we have already a working GUID in place! The thing Linne has already invented. IMHO it is only a question of database quality, whether the info given is a realy GUID or only a part of it.

Existing taxonomic names are not GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers), in that they are not always globally unique. There are numerous generic and higher level names that are the same for plants and animals, and even some species names, e.g. Agathis montana, which is the name of both a wasp and a tree. Failure to grasp this point has doomed some efforts to put taxonomy on the web, such as Wikispecies (http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), and the Tree of Life pages (http://tolweb.org/tree/). These sites use names to identify pages, leaving them open to the problem of homonyms.

Regarrds

Rod

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