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

Robert K. Peet peet at unc.edu
Fri Jun 4 03:55:21 PDT 2004


Hi Nico,

I agree completely!

1.  Regards plants, IPNI is the best thing going for names and original
concepts.  My recent efforts to mine it have caused me to take three steps
back from my past level of respect, but in as much as it was a good 10
steps ahead of everything else, they remain well ahead of the pack.  I
approached them over a year ago about providing a web service for
authentificating names.  At that time they were not interested, save for
one guy I know at Harvard.  Fortunately I found them much more receptive
at the Edinburgh meeting and expect that web services are in their
short-term future.  They still need mechanisms for removing duplicates,
adding missing values, correcting errors, tracking changes and other
management things.  They also need GUIDs. In that all the IPNI partners
are nonprofit (possibly excepting Harvard, if one reads between the lines
of the New York Times today), there is no major financial barrier.

2.  My impression is that ZR remains much more propriatary, but this is a
topic on which Jim can offer far more insight than I.

3.  I think it would be nice for SEEK to provide a small spin-off software
tool or service for registration of names, which could pipe directly to
IPNI and ZR if they want, but also retain a copy for the public domain. As
this matures it could be handed off to one or more professional
organizations for taxonomists.  This service could simultaneously register
a GUID for the new taxon Let's think about how this might work.  In
concept it is simple.  The trick is getting community buyin.  Without the
buyin of at least one of IPNI, ZR & GBIF it would go nowhere.

Bob



On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Nico M. Franz wrote:

> 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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 Robert K. Peet, Professor              Phone:  919-962-6942
 Department of Biology, CB#3280         Fax:    919-962-6930
 University of North Carolina           Cell:   919-368-4971
 Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3280  USA       Email:  peet at unc.edu

             http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/

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