[tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in DwCscientificName: good or bad?

Tony.Rees at csiro.au Tony.Rees at csiro.au
Wed Nov 24 14:42:15 CET 2010


Markus,

Thanks for the info. I'm slowly getting the impression that there is not a huge appetite for adding canonicalName although it appears folk are supplying this in many cases anyway, with or without separate authorship element populated.

One other thing did occur to me. I am thinking there are actually a couple of different use cases here. One is for occurrence data which then has to be matched against a reference taxonomy, including all sorts of rough stuff. The other is for formatting and transfer of the reference taxonomies themselves (I do both at different times, also you ingest both too). Does that have any impact on the choices / decisions to make here?

Other than that I'll probably just shut up now :)

Cheers - Tony

________________________________________
From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of "Markus Döring (GBIF)" [mdoering at gbif.org]
Sent: Wednesday, 24 November 2010 11:56 PM
To: Chuck Miller
Cc: tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; dmozzherin at eol.org
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in       DwCscientificName: good or bad?

Chuck,
we see all sorts of things you can imagine in scientificName. For occurrence records the vast majority is the canonical form though - with an empty scientificNameAuthorship. I'd think they mostly dont have the authorship information captured in their system.

Some recent statistics I did on the latest 269 million occurrence records for taxonomy can be seen here:
http://code.google.com/p/gbif-occurrencestore/wiki/TaxonomicIntegration#Statistics

We have roughly 3.5 million distinct scientific names.
Parsing them into their canonical form leaves only 2.1 million, only few of them being monomials (95.000 names representing 14.3 million occurrence records).

Not surprisingly zoological names often contain the year while botanical ones often contain the authorship.
You will find 4 parted names and multiple authorships in the same name for different parts, eg a species authorship and a subspecies one.

Markus


On Nov 24, 2010, at 0:16, Chuck Miller wrote:

> Dave,
> The botanical folks often include the authors with their names. What do
> the data records coming into GBIF from herbarium collections look like?
> Do they mostly include or omit the authors in scientificName?
>
> Chuck
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony.Rees at csiro.au [mailto:Tony.Rees at csiro.au]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 5:09 PM
> To: Chuck Miller; deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
> Cc: dremsen at gbif.org; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; dmozzherin at eol.org
> Subject: RE: [tdwg-content] [tdwg-tag] Inclusion of authorship in
> DwCscientificName: good or bad?
>
> Hi all,
>
> I just had a quick look at the first few thousand data records coming
> into OBIS for my region (Australia). Just about every supplier who
> includes authority as dwc:scientificNameAuthor has used
> dwc:scientificName "incorrectly" i.e., for the canonical name not the
> canonical name + author. This data then flows into GBIF, ALA, etc. and
> circulates in this form. So "users" are already ignoring the definition
> of dwc:scientificName in practice, it would seem, with no apparent ill
> effects (?) - not sure whether this is good or bad, hence the title of
> my original question which prompted this thread...
>
> - Tony


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