Dear Roger,

Thanks for your nice summary.

The important thing to note here is it doesn't matter what a name is! All the nomenclatural stuff is up to the nomenclator and not the GUID system. If, for example, ZooBank decided it wouldn't issue GUIDs for new combinations and it did not meet the needs of the community then the community would be free to set up another nomenclator or try and force ZooBank to change. Likewise IPNI and autonyms or whatever.

Nevertheless we should try to guide ZooBank, IPNI, and other nomenclator initiatives in the best possible way to support the GBIF objectives. Especially ZooBank is starting from scratch, which seems to be an ideal situation to develop a congruent system.

But all these discussions about gender, spelling etc are separate from the GUID issues. Basically the taxonomist would go to the nomenclator and say "I want to describe something you haven't issued a GUID for." Either the nomenclator would issue the GUID or the taxonomist would have to start a revolution to get something changed.

I think nomenclators could play an important stabilizing role particularly on the standardization and caching of variant spellings (orthographs, diacritics within author names, gender endings). I mean that if a nomenclator can keep all relevant spelling variants for a certain TaxonName (linked to one GUID), this will much facilitate and accurate the search functions of the GBIF portal.

Indeed -analogous to GeneBank- nomenclators should have a routine to issue a GUID after the submission of a taxon name or taxon concept when certain criteria have been approved. In this respect, like for instance 'MorphoBanks', I expect nomenclators will play an important role in future 'cybertaxonomy' advances (on-line publishing, etc.).

So debates about what the nomenclators issue GUIDs for can spin out to the relevant nomenclator lists (does ZooBank have one yet?).

Please look at the ZooBank article in http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7058/full/437477a.htmlNature and at http://www.iczn.org/new%20ZooBank.htmICZN.

If I am right, as a start ZooBank would like to upload data from BIOSIS, ITIS, Species2000, ECAT, Fauna Europaea, etc.

There is a great deal to flesh out on this but is it something we could agree on as a basic plan?

A detail I would like to discuss within this context in the near future is the best possible way to link species names to genetic resources (e.g. DNA barcodes).

Kind regards,

Yde