[SEEK-Taxon] Re: New Version of LinneanCore

[Gregor Hagedorn]

Dear all,

As Sally mentioned, all the efg wiki webs have been moved and are 
currently at http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/UBIF/LinneanCore 

They look less well, since a hacking of the server necessitated 
moving them prematurely to a new version of the wiki software. They 
work, however and style should be improving soon. I did not do the 
moving (Bob Morris is hosting the UBIF wiki web), but I propably 
should have sent an email around, sorry. When I looked 2 weeks ago (I 
was out of contact since) there was still forward from the old 
location.

> I have a difficulty to express hybrid formulas with the LC.
> Is hybrid formula out of scope of LC?
> We may need to allow to have multiple name-string part under
> single CanonicalName to capture "Agrostis stolonifera L. x
> Polypogon monspeliensis (L.) Desf." or "Brassavola R. Br. x
> Cattleya Lindl. x Laelia Lindl. x Sophronitis Lindl.".  It is
> unnecessary to give a name to a hybrid, so hybrid formula
> without unique name-string may appear in scientific publication.

Hybrid names (including those with more than 2 parents) are a tough 
nut that would be good to solve. I think they should go into a 
clearly marked container to avoid confusing the issue of "normal 
names"

> And it may be prohibited question: do we need tokenized (strutured)
> name as exchange schema, and why?   It is useful to search, so no
> doubt it is necessary for database implementations, but why is it
> necessary to exchange schema?   For easier implementation of XSLTs?

I am not sure TCS needs it to exchange information between one 
concept database and another, but I as a consumer profit very much if 
I want to connect my name-strings in my descriptive and organism 
interaction databases with a nomenclator. Also the tokenized from is 
very important if you want to format, so my three reasons are:

a) if your search you may want a schema to express your search 
criteria
b) if you have name strings (which in my statistic match with the 
name strings from the nomenclator only in 30% of cases) you either 
need to parse all the names, or have them ready-parsed.
c) if you want to format the name (italics and SmallCaps in the right 
places), you need atomized data. Also in botany, you need to 
recognize the autonym case to put the author into the right place.

Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203