[Tcs-lc] concepts of Higher taxa

[Richard Pyle]

I received Martin's original message out of sequence with respect to Paul's
reply, so I'm only now reading the full context of Martin's post:

> That is a taxon concept as published by an individual
> belongs to that person and once published cannot be changed -
> even by the owner of the concept.

I see now that we are in agreement on this point.

> It is a kind of version control mechanism and one that is
> essential  if we are to take a concept  oriented approach
> (as opposed to a name oriented approach ) to indexing into
> non-taxonomic data - eg DNA sequence data, ecological data,
> phytochemical data etc. If we allow the the higher taxon
> concepts to be expanded willy nilly merely by the publication
> of new species then it becomes much harder to identify the
> version of the higher taxon concept that was being adhered
> to when the data was captured making it much harder to reason
> about the comparability of different non-taxonomic data sets.

This is what I like about the idea of the Nominal-type TaxonConcept
instance. It can be the default higher-ranking taxon into which new
lower-ranking taxa are placed, when a specific concept definition for the
higher-ranking taxon is not provided. Essentially, the definition of a
genus-rank Nominal concept would be, roughly, "All primary type specimens
that have ever been explicitly or implicitly included within the genus
circumscription, plus all other organisms in-between." This will give us the
maximum possible circumscription for the genus name, while still being
considerably more restrictive than "all life-forms that have ever lived on
Earth".

Aloha,
Rich