[SEEK-Taxon] TaxonConceptSchema and LinneanCoreSchema

Paterson, Trevor T.Paterson at napier.ac.uk
Mon Nov 29 06:43:42 PST 2004


The team developing the Taxonomic Concept Transfer Schema for TDWG has devised a simple example dataset demonstrating how Taxonomic Revisions and  Nomenclatural Changes  affecting the imaginary Genus Aus might be represented  by the exchange schema. This is an attempt to clarify the relationship between the TCS and the proposed LinneanCore schema which is being developed by Nomenclaturists who wish to represent what they consider to be purely Nomenclatural information. TCS hopes to include the LinneanCore Schema as a component of the TCS, capturing information about names, without introducing a conflicting mechanism for recording the same information in two alternative representations.  
 
In order to explain more clearly how Names are handled by the TCS our example records a number of concept definitions that are published as taxonomic revisions, and one example of a purely nomenclatural observation. We believe that there is considerable overlap between a Nomenclaturist view of the Taxon history and a Taxonomist's: Taxonomists are interested in the published definitions of Original and Revision Concepts; whilst a Nomenclaturist is not interested in the definitions of Concepts but needs to refer to the original publications where names were first introduced. A Nomenclaturist is therefore interested in the same Original Concepts - but only the Name elements of these (i.e. a limited view on the Original Concepts). In addition we need to represent purely nomenclatural observations such as Aus bea should be known as Aus beus; and we have modelled this as the creation of another original concept - without any definitional information other than a relationship to the original concept for the name that the recorded observation is 'correcting'. We think that it should be possible to represent all Nomenclatural observations using this model, but we are interested in testing this with further examples.
 
We would encourage anyone interested to review our example and our commentary on the Linnean Core schema in the context of TCS on our WIKI site. We would be very interested in further (real) examples of nomenclatural changes which may require a different representation in this model. Please visit and use the WIKI at 
http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/tdwg/index.php?pagename=TCSAndTheLinneanCore
The LinneanCore development WIKI can be found at http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/UBIF/LinneanCore
 
 
 
Trevor Paterson PhD 
t.paterson at napier.ac.uk 

School of Computing 
Napier University
Merchiston Campus
EDINBURGH
EH10 5DT
Scotland UK

tel:          +44 (0)131 455-2752 

www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~cs175
www.prometheusdb.org <http://www.prometheusdb.org/>  

 
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