[tdwg-content] proposed term: dwc:verbatimScientificName

[Gregor Hagedorn]

About the problem of author strings in the middle of the scientific
names in autonyms: Perhaps the debate is argued too much from the
providers side. My proposal to add a scientificNameWithAuthorship is
based on consumer use cases.

verbatimScientificName is meant to give the consumer no guarantee
whatever on what form the name has. This is good, because it
guarantees that a maximum of records can be served from providers
having no guarantees themselves. However, it does not allow the
consuming applications or services to make decisions.

I believe the majority of a consumers either need a
scientificNameWithoutAuthorship (output policy, name-matching policy)
or a scientificNameWithAuthorship (unambiguous name representation
policy, name-matching policy).

The latter use case cannot be served with the modification following
Markus's and David's proposal. This means that every service intending
to match or display unambiguous name strings with authors needs to do
parsing. Furthermore, providers that know that they have canonical
scientific names with authorship cannot transmit information about
this fact.

I even doubt, whether the use cases for an isolated
scientificNameAuthorship string are very frequent (although they
certainly exist). I therefore propose to emend DwC with:

verbatimScientificName
scientificNameWithoutAuthorship (which might continued to be called
scientificName)
scientificNameWithAuthorship

and drop the scientificNameAuthorship to reduce complexity.

Gregor