Dear Yde,

Just catching up. There is one small practical point I'd like to understand about Fauna Europaea. You wrote the following:

How is Fauna Europaea organised?

- Basically we have a list of 'naked' taxon names (from the infraspecific level to Kingdom) including full authorship for at least the generic and (infra)specific levels. All those taxon names (read: name elements) have unique id's.

- All epithets are linked to their original genus, so original combinations can be reconstructed. This is nearly, but not completely similar to basionyms in botany because gender unequivalencies are not necessarily corrected.

- Species names are created by recursively linking species-group names to genus-group names. Genus names are parents of specific epithets, and specific epithets are parents of infraspecific epithets.

- Subjective synonyms are specific epithets recursively linked as childs to 'accepted' specific epithets. For objective synonymy genus names synonyms are recursively linked as childs to 'accepted' genus names.

- Conclusion: Names (=naked name element/author/year plus original genus for epithets) are for eternity. Species names (so your taxon names) are temporary concepts (if they are not basionyms) which don't have identifiers and which are not kept in the database after taxonomic changes else then by version control.

- However, an unique species name id can be easily artificially created by merging both generic and epithet id's (a trick we also use for Species2000).

- Taxon concepts are not explicitly covered.

Can you explain a little more about how you handle epithet agreement ("gender unequivalencies") in this system? I realise this is tangential from the main GUID discussion, but it does seem to be a complication to the task of treating the epithet as the primary unit.

Thanks,

Donald

--------------------------------------------------------------- Donald Hobern ( mailto:dhobern@gbif.org dhobern@gbif.org) Programme Officer for Data Access and Database Interoperability Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark Tel: +45-35321483 Mobile: +45-28751483 Fax: +45-35321480 ---------------------------------------------------------------