[tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwC scientificName: good or bad? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Markus Döring]

Tony,
at GBIF we recommend to include the authorship/year for a name to have the most complete full name. This is useful for several reasons:
 - homonym disambiguation
 - getting a better idea of your taxonomic concept
 - not have to deal with autonyms when reassembling an atomised name
And even if you omit the authorship from a name you will need some name parsing/cleaning if you are after consistency across various datasets. 
The infraspecific ranks are treated differently, some people supply more than 2 epithets, some include the subgenus, etc. 

I think it would be useful though to have a canonicalName field that only takes "Genus specificEpithet infraspecificEpithet" and no more. 

Markus


On Nov 18, 2010, at 4:44, Paul Murray wrote:

> (I'll send this to tdwg-content rather than tdwg-tag)
> 
> We are sorting through this issue now. The TDWG vocabulary defines a property "nameComplete" which is the name without authority. It states that the name with authority belongs in a dcterms:title field
> 
> "The complete uninomial, binomial or trinomial name without any authority or year components. Every TaxonName should have a DublinCore:title property that contains the complete name string including authors and year (where appropriate)."
> 
> I'm a tad uneasy about this: a vocabulary expressing an opinion on fields that are outside of its own uri namespace. What if my name objects are more than simply names, and I want the dcterms:title to reflect data that the tdwg vocabulary doesn't know about? I might want my title, for instance, to announce that a record is a draft or test record. In particular, our titles will be including the nomenclatural status ("nom. cons." etc) - does that mean that we are not conforming to the standard?
> 
> On 18/11/2010, at 2:31 PM, <Tony.Rees at csiro.au> wrote:
> 
>> Dear TDWG-persons,
>>  
>> I note that DwC "scientificName" as defined at http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/#scientificName  is supposed to include authorship, however this can also be supplied separately in the field "scientificNameAuthorship". Under that scenario, should authorship be also included in the scientificName field, or omitted?
>>  
>> I can see arguments either way for this - if the authorship is included in the same field as the rest of the scientific name, then that single value is more meaningful and better for e.g. homonym disambiguation. On the other hand, it then requires parsing to get the scientific name without the authority, which if done incorrectly could introduce errors.
>>  
>> Any advice from the persons designing or using this field for data exchange would be appreciated.
>>  
>> Regards - 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
>> 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
>>  
>>  
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> 
> 
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