Jessie wrote:

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....

Here's a friday afternoon, post-pub idea: we set up a concept bank like GenBank. You can publish (and ID) as many concepts as you like in your own databases but it would be good practice to voluntarily deposit your new concepts in some central repository of concepts and after a while nobody would take any paper seriously if it didn't have a bunch of concept bank ids at the bottom of it listing the new concepts formed. People could go in and mine the ConceptBank for concepts and do meta analyses or build up automated checklists out of small concepts culled from monographs. Anyone want to set one up? partially joking ... Sally *** Sally Hinchcliffe *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708 *** S.Hinchcliffe@rbgkew.org.uk