[tdwg-tag] Unresloved technical issues - proposed decisions.

[Soaring Bear]

>Feel free to suggest something different, if .....
>you believe that to not follow your suggestion would be a 
>grave mistake.
<...>
>6. The table will contain Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, 
>and Family columns. Javier will write software to resolve 
>identifications to the Catalog of Life

	Adding taxonomic hierarchy is imperative.  However, using Catalog of Life is likely to disappoint because it appears to be based on a relatively recent APG system which requires gene sequences which are NOT available for most plants, hence a huge number of plants landing in the category called "not assigned", causing a loss of information held in the centuries old Chronquist hierarchy.  
see:
http://delta-intkey.com/angio/www/apg.htm
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/carr/pfamilies.htm

	There are advantages to APG if the classification usage is restricted to genetic work but it is not ready for prime time for other purposes.  Therefore, I recommend that the Chronquist scheme be used for plants. 


Soaring Bear Ph.D. Pharmacology  soaringbear at yahoo.com
http://soaringbear.com/nature/WeedsforNeeds.html
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/presentations/bear_2005_aug/index.htm
author of http://HerbMed.org & http://HerbInsight.com


--- On Thu, 8/26/10, joel sachs <jsachs at csee.umbc.edu> wrote:

> From: joel sachs <jsachs at csee.umbc.edu>
> Subject: [tdwg-tag] Unresloved technical issues - proposed decisions.
> To: tdwg-bioblitz at googlegroups.com, tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
> Date: Thursday, August 26, 2010, 11:45 AM
> Hi Everyone -
> 
> Javier and I chatted yesterday about unresolved technical
> issues. Our 
> primary goal was simplicity. Here are the outcomes. Feel
> free to suggest 
> something different, if either i) you're planning on
> developing around 
> your suggestion; or ii) you believe that to not follow your
> suggestion 
> would be a grave mistake.
> 
> NOTE: by "app" we mean anything that is writing to the
> table - could be a 
> smartphone app, could be a web form, could be a
> screenscraper or 
> tweet-parser.
> 
> 1. All apps will write to the same table. Each app will
> need a Google 
> account, which will be given write-access to the table.
> 
> 2. The occurrence_id will be the row_id assigned by Fusion
> Tables. This is 
> not seen in the web interface, but is available from the
> API.
> 
> 3. To support crowdsourcing of image identification,
> alternative 
> identifications, arguments, etc., there will be a 2nd table
> with columns 
> {occurrence_id, scientificName, vernacularName, Kingdom,
> identifiedBy, 
> identificationResources, identificationRemarks}. One of
> each of these 
> columns will also exist in the Occurrences table. When the
> observation is 
> first reported, any identification will be entered in the
> Occurrences 
> table, with subsequent identifications in the
> Identifications 
> table. (The main motivation for keeping the initial
> identification in the Occurrences 
> table is to ease the process for app developers.)
> 
> 4. Multiple multimedia URLs will be listed in a single
> column, comma 
> separated.
> 
> 5. The lat and long columns will be WGS84. If app
> developers wish, they 
> are welcome to build support for additional datums into
> their apps, since 
> the apps will have authority to create additional columns.
> If this doesn't 
> happen, anyone planning to use another datum  will
> need to announce 
> themselves ahead of time, and we will create 
> appropriate columns for 
> them.
> 
> 6. The table will contain Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order,
> and Family 
> columns. Javier will write software to resolve
> identifications to the 
> Catalog of Life, and to populate the taxonomy columns. If
> someones want to 
> resolve observations to a different classification, they
> are free to do 
> so, and are encouraged to publish the results in Fusion
> Tables.
> 
> 7. In addition to the identification table, there is scope
> for creating an 
> Annotations table and front-end, should anyone wish to
> tackle this.
> 
> 
> Here's a timetable that would be nice to adhere to:
> 
> Sept. 1: Final versions of the Occurrences and
> Identifications tables 
> published to Fusion Tables. Write access will only be
> granted to 
> developers. These will be the test tables. The day before
> the bioblitz, 
> they will become the development tables, and test records
> will be 
> expunged.
> 
> Sept. 3: Table documentation and sample code for writing to
> the tables.
> 
> Sept. 8: Taxanomic resolution, validation, assignment of
> taxon 
> GUIDS/LSIDs.
> 
> Sept. 15: At least one Image identification framework in
> place.
> 
> Sept. 15 - Sept. 28: Testing and work on visualization and
> other 
> data-oriented services (e.g. publication as DwC or Linked
> Data, etc.)
> 
> Best to all -
> Joel.
> 
> 
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