Jessie,

Many thanks for this valuable response. For reference, I agree with all of Jessie's judgments below.

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 ---------------------------------------------------------------

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From: Taxonomic Databases Working Group GUID Project [mailto:TDWG-GUID@LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU] On Behalf Of Kennedy, Jessie Sent: 04 November 2005 14:18 To: TDWG-GUID@LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU Subject: Re: Topic 3: GUIDs for Taxon Names and Taxon Concepts - Maybe ...

Dear All

Sorry for coming in so late into the discussion in this list - I have a bit of catching up to do..but have been reading the listings on this Topic with great interest and agreeing with much of what has been said by everyone but still seeing misunderstandings or disagreements between people on what we mean and what we should do which is inevitable given that people have different reasons for wanting GUIDs etc.

To summarise my take on what's been said and if I misquote anyone please forgive me and feel free to correct me..

I agree with Donald (and Rich) about needing Taxon_Name_GUIDs and Taxon_Concept_GUIDs.

I agree with Donald that a shorthand to referring to a Taxon_Concept is the combination of Taxon_Name and the Taxon_Publication. This is slightly but importantly different to Rich here in that the publication should be seen as a taxonomic publication (for another discussion elsewhere) rather than any publication - i.e. not simply usage of a name which could include an observation or identification - this interpretation opens up Taxonomic_Concepts too widely to cover potential taxa rather than those which have been defined, described and published in some scientific manner.)

I agree with the principle that GUIDs do not have to be issued from a central repository BUT..

I do not agree that we should be issuing GUIDs for every taxonomic record - be that for Taxonomic_Name or Taxonomic_Concept. There needs to be some control - even if the control is self imposed.

I agree with Sally that we should have Nomenclators provide GUIDs for Taxon_Names but would be more strict and say that these names should have only one GUID and that the GUID should always resolve to exactly the same name. So IPNI would be plant names, Index fugorum fungi names, zoobank when available animal names etc. and that we should share the resource of fixing this rather than duplicating effort (if I had any resource to give;-) ) IPNI and IF wouldn't overlap in names.

I agree that anyone should be able to assign GUIDs but for their "own" Taxonomic_Concepts, (so for example a provider like say Mammal species of the world (or Bergey's manual for bacteria) which has well described concepts, could issue GUIDs for all of the concepts they recognise and other users of concepts could use their GUID in their database to record observations etc if they agreed with their concept. If they didn't agree with the MSW concept they could publish their own Taxonomic_Concept and GUID and relate it to some MSW Taxonomic_Concept GUID) BUT..

I would argue that we should try to avoid generating GUIDs multiple times for legacy concepts. For example, as mentioned by Rich the original descriptions of names are original concepts - we wouldn't want ITIS, GBIF, Species 2000, SEEK and whomever else creating different GUIDS of their own to represent this concept if possible or we would never move towards knowing we're talking about the same thing (- how this might be managed is probably for another discussion topic).

I agree with Rod to the extent that moving forward with a distributed GUID publication system is easy where providers publish GUIDs for their own digital objects BUT..

I don't think it's helpful or in the spirit of GUIDs to take a digital object and republish it with another GUID without managing the replication of the GUIDs for the object - which could effectively be what happens if every data provider just issues GUIDs for the data they hold which is effectively the same as what someone else has already published. I think we do want to move towards reuse of GUIDs as much as possible and therefore sharing of work and easier and more accurate data integration. Also, what's the point of having millions of unique GUIDs if I don't know which one to put in "my" database to represent the Taxon_Name or Taxonomic_Concept I want to refer to? Rod would suggest this be self selecting (use your favourite provider, or the one you're told to - but I don't think it's that simple and doesn't get us towards a good solution - unless the one you're told to use does it properly!)

I don't agree with Rod that we should do only purely nomenclatural mappings - as for most of the projects I'm involved with and people I've spoken to this will not solve their problems - we do need to know what the name means. However nomenclatural mapping is useful and a part of solving the overall problem.

I agree with Rod that GUIDs will not solve all our problems but if managed and planned in a sensible way they will help us on our way to solving the problem.

What providers of GUIDs need to decide is what they are providing a GUID for - in our area is it a Taxon_Name, a Taxonomic_Concpet, a Taxonomic_Observation, a Specimen, a Description (of a specimen or Taxonomic_Concept), a Taxonomic_Publication or whatever. Each of these things can probably refer to some to the other things and these should be using GUIDs.

For example if you're an ecologist you might record survey data and issue-

a GUID for a Taxonomic_Observation which contains

a GUID to a Taxonomic_Concept which contains

a GUID to a Taxonomic_Name which in turn will contain

a GUID to a Specimen - the type specimen

a GUID to a Taxonomic_Name maybe the basionym

a Description which in turn will contain

GUIDs to the Specimen(s) or Taxonomic_Concept described

The ecologist may only want to know about their observation of the Taxonomic_Concept and not concern themselves with the embedded detail. So hopefully you'll see that we really want commonality in usage of GUIDs as much as possible so I think we need to think a bit about how we manage this - possibly another topic for discussion and certainly one that GBIF could lead.

I agree with Rod the idea of a local GUID as being nonsensical - GUID meaning Globally Unique Identifier. The issue is about global uniqueness and resolvability which are separate things but related in this discussion. And as Rod says about whether we mean the same thing. Now as Rod says sorting out the name part is a huge step forward I think sorting out the Concept part is a bigger step forward - but won't EVER solve the issue of whether or not someone identified something properly or whether they're thinking the same as me but if we have Taxonomic_Concepts (with GUIDs) we're nearer to knowing what we mean. Isn't this what the semantic web people are saying - you can't assume that because the name is the same we're talking about the same thing... So I do believe we need Taxonomic_Concepts and Taxonomic_Names and all we're trying to do is sort out the terminology and semantics for what concepts of organisms exist or have existed in the world.

Jessie

Prof. J B Kennedy

School of Computing

Napier University

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Email: j.kennedy@napier.ac.uk

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