[tdwg-content] canonical name for named hybrid & infragenericnames [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Tony.Rees at csiro.au Tony.Rees at csiro.au
Sun Dec 12 23:29:23 CET 2010


Hi Greg, Paul,

I checked versions 3 and 4 of HISPID and the intended hybrid indicator "x" is given as lowercase, not uppercase, so your display code may be fine, just have to fix the content :-) - actually as stated by Paul (Holland) and the ICBN, it needs to be replaced by a multiplication symbol for display anyway.

Re 12 million people can't be wrong - maybe they can, if the latest sales figures for Andre Rieu live in concert DVDs are anything to go by. (apologies to any A.R. lovers out there - just kidding of course)

On a more serious note - presumably those 12 million downloads were not machine-machine transactions where hybrid nomenclature was ever checked, or the downloaders cared particularly about compliance with the Code or other standards, or reconciling content from multiple sources - not an attitude we would encourage on this list, surely!

Cheers - Tony

Tony Rees
Manager, Divisional Data Centre,
CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research,
GPO Box 1538,
Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
Ph: 0362 325318 (Int: +61 362 325318)
Fax: 0362 325000 (Int: +61 362 325000)
e-mail: Tony.Rees at csiro.au<mailto:Tony.Rees at csiro.au>
Manager, OBIS Australia regional node, http://www.obis.org.au/
Biodiversity informatics research activities: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/biodiversity.htm
Personal info: http://www.fishbase.org/collaborators/collaboratorsummary.cfm?id=1566

________________________________
From: whitbread.greg at gmail.com [mailto:whitbread.greg at gmail.com] On Behalf Of greg whitbread
Sent: Sunday, 12 December 2010 10:44 PM
To: Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart)
Cc: pmurray at anbg.gov.au; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] canonical name for named hybrid & infragenericnames [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Tony,

A mix up in the method generating APNI name strings reusing the HISPID hybrid indicator code for named hybrid - 'X' . Now fixed.  Perhaps more interesting is that this method has been in place since 1992 and while, since then,  the APNI web interface has addressed c. 12 million download requests not one of them has resulted in a complaint about the style of the hybrid indicator.  I wonder if anybody cares.

One complaint that we do have though is that hybrid indicator upsets searching and sorting at least for named generic hybrids. It seems that users of the data would like to see it separated from the name string completely.

greg

On 12 December 2010 08:10, <Tony.Rees at csiro.au> wrote:
Hi Paul, all,

Well, if the existing ANBG software code is displaying the hybrid symbol as an uppercase rather than a lowercase "x", then I would say there was something wrong with it, since this usage is not supported by the ICBN.

In any case, to summarise, a recipient / parser of incoming taxonomic names and associated data must therefore be able to cope successfully with hybrid indicators for genera in any of the following formats:

 ×Foo (ICBN preferred usage as per examples)
 × Foo (apparently tolerated, since white space appears to be optional??)
 x Foo (ICBN preferred alternative)
 X Foo (apparently incorrect, but found in some quite reputable systems)
 xFoo (again, probably tolerated, but not sure...)

have I missed anything? (e.g. "Goo × Hoo" or variants thereof?)

I am also presuming that in all these cases, the equivalent canonical version would be Foo. Does this mean that an extra DwC field would also be needed now, for hybrid indicator?

Regards - Tony
________________________________________
From: Paul Murray [pmurray at anbg.gov.au<mailto:pmurray at anbg.gov.au>]
Sent: Saturday, 11 December 2010 4:05 PM
To: Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart)
Cc: morris.bob at gmail.com<mailto:morris.bob at gmail.com>; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org<mailto:tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org>
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] canonical name for named hybrid & infragenericnames [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
On 10/12/2010, at 5:47 PM, <Tony.Rees at csiro.au> <Tony.Rees at csiro.au> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Paul Murray wrote:
>
>> A generic name may be marked as a hybrid. It is rendered
>>      × Foo
>
>
> Actually my understanding is that ×Foo is the Code-endorsed version:


Hmm ... . Well, perhaps there's an issue with our existing (software) code.

http://www.anbg.gov.au/cgi-bin/apni?taxon_id=272817
http://www.anbg.gov.au/cgi-bin/apni?taxon_id=40429

There are only 9 genera in APNI that look like this.
X Cynochloris Clifford & Everist
X Calassodia M.A.Clem.
X Agropogon P.Fourn.
X Chilosimpliglottis Jeanes
X Vappaculum M.A.Clem. & D.L.Jones
X Taurodium D.L.Jones & M.A.Clem.
X Glossadenia Kavulak
X Cyanthera Hopper & A.P.Br<http://A.P.Br>.
X Festulolium Asch. & Graebn.

Perhaps the issue is that it's a shade tricky to get it right if you have to use the letter, and so we err on the side of caution and put spaces around the genus name. Although a multiplication sign is preferred to an 'x', I believe our powerbuilder interface was written back in the day before all this new-fangled unicode. Or perhaps it's simply that getting Windows to do proper multiplication signs involves explaining codepages to the windows oracle client: a byzantine process at best, and one which involves getting Admin access to the box. Hence the 'x'.

(Once, ages ago, I got oracle sql-plus to work correctly on one Windows machine on the departmental network, but we never did succeed in getting the machine sitting right next to it to do umlauts properly. Our users addressed this issue by inserting html escape codes into the data.)

In any case - anyone looking to parse names into their components may encounter something like this.

Oh - here's some more:

http://www.anbg.gov.au/cgi-bin/apni?taxon_id=257927
xAstackea
xAstackea 'Winter Pink'
xChamecordia
xChamecordia 'Eric John'
xChamecordia 'Jasper'
xChamecordia 'Southern Stars'
xChamecordia 'Susie'
xRhinochilus
xRhinochilus 'Dorothy'

I think that the issue is that these genera were only inserted into the data in order to make it possible to construct the cultivar name. The genera are not published scientific names at all - 'Chamecordia' doesn't appear anywhere as a genus name except in these records (heck: even google has never heard of it), but Wrigley, J. & Fagg, M. (2003) named the cultivars thusly, so we have to jam them into the data somehow.

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--
Greg Whitbread
Australian National Botanic Gardens
Australian National Herbarium
+61 2 62509482
ghw at anbg.gov.au<mailto:ghw at anbg.gov.au>
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