[SEEK-Taxon] what is the role of IK and ZR in the SEEK Taxon scenario?

[Nico M. Franz]

Hi all:

    I'm breaking the silence after the Edinburgh storm. I was thinking that 
in our list of "players" (ecologists, taxonomists, compilers) involved in 
the Use Cases, and also in the transfer schema, it's not clear enough what 
role the two major traditional indices of names should play.

    I'm talking about the Index Kewensis (IK) for plants and the Zoological 
Record (ZR) for animals.

    The IK has 1.4 million plant names. It's been maintained since 1885, 
and initiated by Darwin (apparently when he wasn't writing about orchids, 
beetle horns, or spending time with his wife and 10 kids). I quote a U.S. 
library site: "The Index Kewensis is not directly available on the web 
(personally I think it should be) but is effectively accessible by virtue 
of its inclusion in the excellent 
<http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/%7Edrc/ipni.htm>IPNI database." See also 
http://www.ipni.org/ik_blurb.html

    The ZR exists since 1865, has 1.5 million records (though not all are 
strictly taxonomic). It seems to be as much bound by traditional economic 
(publishing) restrictions as the IK, and - in absence of an IPNI for 
animals, is now only available through institutional subscription. Please 
correct me (Jim??) if I'm wrong, or missing important parts. The editor 
expressed interest here (http://www.iczn.org/register.pdf) in setting up a 
registry for new zoological names. I'm not sure whether this topic is still 
warm.

    The main differences between these two entities and organizations like 
Species 2000, ITIS, Euro+Med PlantBase, etc. is: their databases don't 
explicitly take a stance of the status of concepts, and don't offer (again, 
so far as I can tell) one or multiple coherent views about how everything 
fits into a hierarchical classification. They do however document when and 
where something became a nomenclatural synonym in the literature rather 
than a valid name for a taxon. Possibly various other notes embedded e.g. 
in abstracts of papers.

    Both the IK and the ZR are amazingly comprehensive. They're in my view 
the number-one source for what Jessie & Robert call "original concepts" 
(Richard Pyle's protonyms). It seems like part of our plan for survival is 
to become a hub for managing and transferring information across a database 
network. For various reasons I believe having original (however currently 
invalid) concepts can be just as important as keeping up to speed with 
currently accepted and used ITIS versions, etc. There's also a giant source 
of concepts that clearly should get GUIDs as soon as possible, no matter 
how shallow they are at first in terms of content. For Bellis perennis L. 
sec. Linnaeus 1753, we wouldn't turn to ITIS but to the IK, right?

    In short, I'd really be interested in any comments about the role of 
the IK (IPNI?; Jessie?) and the ZR (Jim?) within the SEEK Taxon scenario. 
Or the GBIF scenario for that matter. Are the economic issues a major 
stumbling block here to accessing these concepts, or is there something we 
can reasonably try to move? Certainly our transfer and databasing efforts 
so far have focused on entities like that actually HAVE a lot of digitized 
data, and these two, with a combined 3 million references, probably lead 
the way.

Cheers,

Nico

Nico M. Franz
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
735 State Street, Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Phone: (805) 966-1677; Fax: (805) 892-2510; E-mail: franz at nceas.ucsb.edu
Website: http://www.cals.cornell.edu/dept/entomology/wheeler/Franz/Nico.html

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