[tdwg-content] synonyms in DwC Archives

Patrick Leary pleary at mbl.edu
Wed Mar 19 22:34:11 CET 2014


On Mar 18, 2014, at 6:35 PM, Markus Döring <m.doering at mac.com> wrote:

> The common idea is to include synonyms together with accepted taxa in the core file. This allows one to also add extension data to synonyms, for example bibliographic references, types data, etc. The term acceptedNameUsageID is used to link to the accepted record in the core file (targeting taxonID), originalNameUsageiD for the basionym and taxonomicStatus to declare a specific type of synonym such as homo/heterotypic or later/junior synonym. The scientificName is used both for accepted and synonym records.

On Mar 19, 2014, at 5:40 AM, Markus Döring <m.doering at mac.com> wrote:

> I was in favor of also replace dwc:taxonID with dwc:nameUsageID to achieve some consistency and be clear about what we are talking about, but we sticked to taxonID for reasons I cannot remember.


Some feedback from EOL, for what it's worth. We basically follow what Markus described. We expect synonym names to be included in the same file with taxa. We expect that for synonyms, the row in the Taxon file will include the scientificName, will indicate the status of the name using taxonomicStatus, and will reference the preferred record using acceptedNameUsageID (which will point to the taxonID of the of the accepted record; its worth noting the different suffixes is confusing for users and I would support Markus's proposed nameUsageID if even as a term equivalent to taxonID).

We have noticed a common case where the provider will not use acceptedNameUsageID and will instead use parentID to link synonyms to the preferred record. So we watch for those cases where a record has a taxonomicStatus which indicates it is not preferred, and has no acceptedNameUsageID but does have a parentNameUsageID which points to something that looks to be the same rank, and we will interpret that as synonymy as well. This is not a practice to recommend, but something our parsing methods support.

EOL does not use ResourceRelationship for any purposes.


-Patrick

----------------------------
Biodiversity Informatics
Encyclopedia of Life
Marine Biological Laboratory
Woods Hole, MA
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