Topic 3: GUIDs for Taxon Names and Taxon Concepts

Yde de Jong yjong at SCIENCE.UVA.NL
Fri Nov 4 12:14:33 CET 2005


Dear Sally,

>>>[Yde] For practical reasons I think the starting point for
>>>assigning GUIDs should be basically nomenclatural.
>>
>>[Richard] I completely agree -- but again, what gets a "Name" GUID?
>>(as opposed to a "usage" GUID or a "concept" GUID)  Only basionyms?
>>(I hope!)  Or also different combinations? (I hope not!) Or also
>>spelling variants? (I *really* hope not!!)  There is also a problem
>>of how to deal with autonyms (=nominotypical names in zoology).
>>One GUID, or two? Logically, only one -- but most people don't do
>>it that way.
>
>[Sally] I agree that name guids are probably a good place to start,
>partly because they're one of the areas where the rules have been
>fairly thoroughly thrashed out over the past 200 years ... I would
>argue (after all the debate that went on in the TCS-LC mailing list)
>that a new combination _should_ get a GUID, (after all, as has been
>said
>before, GUIDs are cheap...) because there is a good mechanism in the
>LC part of the TCS to resolve from a new combination to the base
>name. However if the zoologists don't like to treat new combinations
>as names in their own right, I see no problem with them not doing it
>... as long as whatever system we come up with will allow both
>approaches side by side.

Zoologists should establish a central nomenclator to keep their combinations.

I have to check if the TCS can deal with objective synonymy in a
zoological sense. Species2000 for instance can't not deal either with
objective synonymy nor with basionyms and is therefore missing a
crucial part of information.

>[Sally] Obviously the zoologists have always had the problem that they don't
>have a comprehensive nomenclator but now that they're working on that
>with registration - are there any other significant gaps that aren't
>covered by a nomenclator of some sort that could be used to issue
>ids?

I don't agree. Obviously botanist don't have real nomenclators and
probably will never be able to establish one on short term because of
their problems with homonyms, pro parte synonymy, etcetera. I
discussed this issue with Frank Bisby and his team in St Petersburg
and they agreed that while zoologists can try to set up a central
nomenclator (like ZooBank), botanist should look for other solutions.
This could be one or more concept based lists like IOPI.

Kind regards,

Yde




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