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

[David Remsen (GBIF)]

> The thing that concerns me about 3a is the conditional definition of
> scientificName (i.e., it excludes authorship when that information is
> pre-parsed, but includes it when it's not pre-parsed).

right.  That is where we are today.  We need to test the contents  
every time.   One thing we are developing requirements for is a  
DarwinCore Archive "Normaliser" which would be a web service/web app  
client  that can accepted a DwC-A as input and would output the same  
data as a new DwC-A that conforms to a set of rules based on those  
requirements.  So one thing would be to parse the names into the  
authorship field for simpler consumption.

> The thing that concerns me about 3b is that scientificName is  
> (supposedly?)
> required; so if someone with unparsed information provides
> scientificNameWithAuthorship, then are they supposed to leave  
> scientificName
> blank?

The short answer is yes,  they would leave it blank.  if they could  
parse it then they would have put the parts into name and author  
elements in the first place.   I also think the inverse is true.  If  
it is already split and they put it into name and author fields - they  
won't concatenate and put a new, merged copy into a name+authorship  
field.

In regard to the requirement confusion - either we keep  
dwc:scientificName alone and have a simple requirement test or we add  
a new term and make it a conditional requirement.  My point was,  if  
we add a new term,  then the set (scientificNameWithAuthorship,  
scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship) is more clear than  
(canonicalName, scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship)

DR


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> Rich
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