[SEEK-Taxon] guids

Richard Pyle deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
Mon May 24 17:51:15 PDT 2004


Thanks, Nico:

> --- I would've said that referring to the same name/reference/date
> intersection is the cut-off point for a GUID. That's the first of your two
> options.

O.K., that makes sense.  So, then the different "versions" would all be
based on the same Name Sec Reference?  But the reasons for the multiple
versions would be...only typos & such?  Or might they involve different
ideas about the scope of the circumscription itself?

> Though I'm not exactly sure how ITIS does and should do things.
> They're kind of silently revolutionizing taxonomy as we knew it and we are
> building to keep up (or so I feel sometimes). When ITIS puts out a new
> version of ITIS, en bloc and at a particular time, maybe that should
really
> be handled as a mix of old and new GUIDs, depending on what (little,
> probably) has changed.

Yeah....I'm not sure, exactly, how TSN's would map to SEEK GUID's.  They're
not exactly names, and they're not exactly concepts....

> --- six concepts - check!; the relations among them - check!; perfect
> example of how to do it right. Since the deeper intuitions about
> "how much
> is new" (e.g. nothing between 1 & 3) are captured in the synonymy
> relations
> (tapping myself on the shoulder here...), I see no need to merge them.

O.K., good -- then so far we seem to see things the same way!

> After all one could (perhaps in other situations) disagree about the "="
> judgment, or put things together differently. A merge of 1 & 3 into one
> GUID would put a lot of burden on the shoulders of that GUID, essentially
> the same burden that names couldn't lift in the first place.

Yes, exactly!  The "=" is a third-party subjective interpretation, and the
data model should treat it accordingly.  At this point we're talking about
relationships among different concepts; not versions of the same concept.

> >Suppose ITIS recorded the concepts of 5 and 6; and SP2K recorded the same
> >concepts of 5 & 6, but mis-spelled the author's name as "Pile".  Would
> >those, then, represent different versions of the same concepts?
> >
> >i.e.: Concept 5, Version ITIS  |  Concept 5, Version SP2K  |  etc.
>
> --- yes again. When the task is to refer to someone else's concept, which
> has a fixed extension in space and time (your 2003 paper), the
> implication
> is that there only exists one Pyle 2003 view. More or less
> faulty/complete
> representations of that view in different databases would be versions of
> the same concept.

O.K., good -- that makes it clearer in my mind.  So the argument, then, is
whether or not different versions of the metadata associated with
unambiguously (objectively) the same concept need he assignment of separate
GUID's -- or whether that sort of metadata "versioning" should be
accomodated in another way, and the GUID's defined directly as the
circumscription.

> What you have here is only 1 concept/GUID, e.g.
> Centropyge [whoever named it first] SEC. PYLE 2003. I think we don't want
> to assign GUIDs to versions.

O.K. -- that, then comes back to my original question.  Different "versions"
of documenting the details of Pyle's 2003 implied circumscription of the
name Centropyge Kaup would appaently be assigned different GUIDs, according
to Dave's last post.  Or do I misunderstand?

> In Edinburgh Jessie made strong arguments for
> a 1-concept-1-GUID policy that allows versions to take care of sloppy
> transferring (who knows when we'll have Linnaeus' figures scanned and put
> into the database?).

I agree with Jessie on this.  But...then why extend the GUID to include a
version number?

Aloha,
Rich

=======================================================
Richard L. Pyle, PhD
Natural Sciences Database Coordinator, Bishop Museum
1525 Bernice St., Honolulu, HI 96817
Ph: (808)848-4115, Fax: (808)847-8252
email: deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
http://www.bishopmuseum.org/bishop/HBS/pylerichard.html





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