[tdwg-content] proposed term: dwc:verbatimScientificName

[Richard Pyle]

> You said that the "required" form would be ...

Actually, what I said was: " verbatimScientificName is the required field";
I didn't say anything about "required form" (see original post appended
below).  Right now, scientificName is (I think?) treated as a required
field.  My point was that verbatimScientificName should take on that role
(along with the existing definition for scientificName), because *everyone*
can provide a verbatim scientific name.

My second point was not part of a "required" form (as evidenced by my use of
the word "should", no doubt much to the dismay of Bob Morris); it was a
suggestion that for content holders with parsed data, the "required" element
(verbatimScientificName) could easily be generated from the parsed bits.

> If they don't have the authorship then they cannot output the "required"
form.

Again, if you read my post, you'll see that I never said anything about a
"required form".

> Yes. I should have written code in 
> some of those as "Code".
>
> Kind of like "Bible"

I wouldn't rely on capitalization alone to disambiguate (I know some
programmers who would hold software Code at the biblical level).  I think
when mixing the terms in the same post, there should be a qualifier (like
"nomenclatural" vs. "software").  Same goes for the unqualified word "name",
which should NEVER, EVER, EVER be used in our community without some sort of
qualifier ("canonical", "in the botanical sense", "in the zoological sense",
"in the bacterial sense", "as a text string", etc.)

Aloha,
Rich

===========================
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
wrote:
I think this is *exactly* the right solution. I would go further to make it
clear that:
 
-          verbatimScientificName is the required field (with scientificName
and scientificNameAuthorship as optional)
-          When a source database maintains separate fields  corresponding
to scientificName and scientificNameAuthorship, they should be concatenated
(with a single space between them) to form the required
verbatimScientificName
 
Aloha,
Rich