[tcs-lc] TCS/LC Name Domain

[Richard Pyle]

Most of the issues we've been discussing apply equally to
historical/existing data, as well as likely taxonomic practice for the
forseeable future.  We can hope that providing standards and tools will
nudge the taxonomnic community towards being more explicit about the
boundaries of the taxonomic concepts to which they apply scientific names --
but I wouldn't hold my breath expecting the whole community to change over
night.  If we're lucky, authors will take the trouble to add the "SEC. xxxx"
qualification to their names (whether or not most authors will really know
that their concept is congruent to that of xxxxx is another matter).  But
there will continue to be a need for authors to refer to concepts that as
yet have no Code-designated holotype within the circumscription, in a
semi-scientific way....which brings me back to my original question:

How should LC/TCS deal with the various flavors of these "defined but as yet
un-named concepts" ("cf.", "aff.", "n.sp. 1", etc., etc.)?  Should it be
part of LC, or external to it (especially important if names are treated as
distinct objects).  I've thought about it a lot these past few days, but am
no closer to a satisfactory answer.

In case anyone is wondering, the dataset that led me down this path is the
Hawaii Insect Taxonomy database, which contains something on the order of
11,000+ Code-compliant names, and ~100,000 "potential concepts" (names used
in scientific literature, primarily in the sorts of publications that
produce concept definitions).  Something on the order of 6,500 of these
potential concepts use one of ~3,000 "semi-scientific" names of the sort I
have been describing ("cf.", "aff.", "n.sp. 1", etc.).  In most cases, these
are not what most of you would classify as "identifications" -- rather, they
are "placeholder" names used to refer to recognized species concepts for
which a Code-compliant name was not available at the time of the
publication.  A ratio of 3:11 unnamed:named scientific species-level
concepts is not a trivial block of data that can be easily ignored.  Note
that in many cases, later publications go so far as to say (e.g., when
describing a new species) something to the effect of "...this is the species
refered to by Smith 1975 as 'Aus cf. bus'....".  None of them involve
specimen or observation identifications per se.

Aloha,
Rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tcs-lc-bounces at ecoinformatics.org
> [mailto:tcs-lc-bounces at ecoinformatics.org]On Behalf Of Gregor Hagedorn
> Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 10:52 PM
> To: tcs-lc at ecoinformatics.org
> Subject: Re: [tcs-lc] TCS/LC Name Domain
>
>
> >    We've stated on various occasions that - for a concept approach to
> > fully succeed - individual experts, museums, on-line providers,
> > ecologist users, etc. will have to be more explicit about what kind of
> > speaker role (author, identifier) they wish to assume. This so because
> > calling everything a concept will lead to useless and highly redundant
> > inflation of poorly defined concepts. To make such inferences (concept
> > vs. identification) about something published in the past is of course
> > not always easy or unambiguous. Bob just gave some guidelines and they
> > seem sensible as a good first approximation. Why push further? I think
> > these issues will eventually sort themselves out in practice.
>
> When taking a perspective of a "future code of biological
> conduct" rather than
> existing biology, it would help me to explicitly state this. I
> (and I believe
> many others discussing here) have another perspective, dealing
> with existing
> biological knowledge.
>
> I do agree that elaborating an "International code of taxon
> concept conduct"
> (ICTCC) is valuable - even if this looks like making fun of it...
>
> But I also think that existing biological information is at the
> moment more
> important for GBIF. It would help me if proposals for the future
> could also
> include explicit handling procedure for current practices - this
> is really what
> I try to "push further". That is, the only thing I disagree with
> is your last
> sentence.
>
> Gregor----------------------------------------------------------
> Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
> Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
> Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
> Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
> 14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203
>
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