[SEEK-Taxon] RE: LC/TCS - How many schemas?

[Kennedy, Jessie]

Hi Paul

My point was that most of the 'concepts' we might readily capture using TCS from, for example 400,000 herbarium labels from herb. IMI, will result in 400,000 concepts. A similar exercise might be carried out on fungi in herb. B but then I am still 'afraid' that however we analyse these two datasets we will be unable to resolve much beyond name matching and specimen (duplicates) matching, which says little about the taxa represented by the specimens themselves, and can be done without TCS.
 
you are correct in that we could get 400000 concepts and transfer them with TCS - but I don't think we should if we are sensible about what we do - I would argue that the labels on specimens are identifications, not concept definitions. 
How can you name a specimen with a name if you don't know what the name meant? i.e. the concept associated with that name must've already been defined. Now if you choose not to tell me what definition you meant by the name - that's a different matter and I'm dealing with unknown data - but it's still an identification.
 
We can decide to try and have useful and usable concepts - to me the most useful to start are what we refer to as original concepts, i.e. the first description of the name and it's associated type specimen and following this the "best" current view on particular taxa. Any intermediate concepts that have been described would only be created if someone was interested in a particular taxon and needed to resolve the different meanings of the names in identifications over time - say as defined in different floras over a geographoical or temporal range related to their field of study.
 

Regards resolving concepts then - it depends on the information we have, how precise we want to be  and how general any algorithm developed to do the resolutuin might be. these are all variable and can be given user control - so if you want to match on names then they'll all look the same to you but if someone else knows they only want to match on data where then concepts are the same then that's what they will get.

 Was the instability apparent from your analyses determined entirely 'mechanically', without redetermination of specimens or other taxonomic input?

A very extensively adopted methodology in producing national checklists is to account for only those names used in a national context (previous checklists, national flora/fauna/mycota) and ignore other names which might be universally recognized synonyms of the names accepted in the checklist. Now consider a checklist for each of two countries which use the same methodology but for a species common to both checklists use a different subset of those universally recognized synonyms. Will not all implementations of the TCS deduce that different species concepts are in use in the two checklists when, infact, there is but one species represented in both checklists?

 
I would agree that using only concepts from say national floras etc would be a good way to get started - these are clear and fairly well defined concepts and easy to say who "owns" the concept. 
Now regarding resolution - this is what some of the research will have to determine - we need to prioritise the rules for matching and give users some control over this for when they know better than the system.
 
lots of interesting research to do .....
 
Jessie

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