[tdwg-content] proposed term: dwc:verbatimScientificName

[Gregor Hagedorn]

On 9 December 2010 22:31, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org> wrote:
> I guess what I don't understand is: what would go in
> scientificNameWithAuthorship that isn't already achievable via these three
> terms:
>
> verbatimScientificName (any text string purporting to represent as
> unambiguously as possible a scientific name, inclusive of authorship if
> available)
> scientificName (effectively canonical name explicitly without authorship =
> your scientificNameWithoutAuthorship)
> scientificNameAuthorship (only the authorship; no scientific name elements)
>
> Give me a use case where one would want to use something like
> scientificNameWithAuthorship in a way that couldn't be served by these three
> elements.

Use case: A database desiring to identify taxa unambiguous by
nomenclatural name would have a field containing:

Lobelia spicata Lam. var. spicata

I can export this to verbatimScientificName, but I cannot inform
anyone that verbatimScientificName contain a full canonical name with
authorship. As a consumer, I must expect verbatimScientificName to
contain anything like:
Lobelia spicata Lam. var. spicata
Lobelia spicata var. spicata
L. spicata Lam. var. spicata
Lobelia sp. var. spicata (a common form!)
Lobelia (Lobelia) spicata Lam. var. spicata (Lobeliaceae)
or, in the case of a non-autonym, the canonical form would be:
Lobelia spicata var. campanulata McVaugh
but many many databases may have:
Lobelia spicata Lam. var. campanulata McVaugh

What I am striving for is a field in which the best canonical form
available to the provider can be expressed. If a provider has
canonical form, this can be expressed as:
verbatimScientificName = Lobelia spicata Lam. var. spicata
scientificNameWithAuthorship = Lobelia spicata Lam. var. spicata

if the provider knows that it cannot provide a canonical name, then as:
verbatimScientificName = Lobelia spicata Lam. var. spicata
scientificNameWithAuthorship =

Note that this also applies to zoological databases that did not split
author and name. It is impossible to provide a name that is known to
be a canonical name including the authorship to the present proposal.
You can put that into verbatim, but the consumer may not have any
quality expectation on the verbatim name.

> *plenty* of rare use cases out there that DwC does not accommodate, so I
> don't see that as justification for introduction of a new term, that might
> further confuse people. Moreover, it seems like a very simple algorithm for
> a consumer to recognize an autonym (nomenclaturalCode=ICBN + Rank is below
> species + second two components of trinomial are identical), and then format
> the string accordingly from scientificName and scientificNameAuthorship.

I doubt this. You would have to be able to correctly parse all names
in all variants, including non-canonical and mistreated ones.

My point is: with the present proposal you require to parse ANY
name... You cannot have any expectations on a fully qualified name
including authorship with the present proposal. With the modified
proposal, you can make quality expectations on most names, and limit
any extra work to those that have no canonical form.

> I *STRONGLY* disagree with your suggestion to drop scientificNameAuthorship.
> This is an extremely fundamental component to nomenclatural disambiguation,
> and a relative "pain in the parse" for a consumer when provided only with a
> full name-string-with-authorship. To me, the use cases where your suggested
> scientificNameWithAuthorship cannot be easily met with a combination of
> verbatimScientificName , scientificName,  and scientificNameAuthorship are
> far, far, far fewer than the use cases that would benefit from receiving
> content where authorship is pre-parsed from canonical name.

I think we must have a misunderstanding here: The most common way to
express a taxon name is with authorship. This does not solve all
problems of concepts, but it does solve the problem of homonyms. Most
journals require this (let us not debate whether instead they should
require tdwg-lsids). Most online systems show names with authors. Why
then is the desire to have this form where the downstream user of dwc
data can have an assurance of this form of name a rare use case?

Gregor