[tcs-lc] Misspelled Names and Orthographic Variants (Issue 005)

[Roger Hyam]

Hi Everyone,

Whilst marking up the instance document on Rich's hypothetical example 
that I have just posted to the list I came across some points on 
misspelled names and have had a bit of a discussion with Jessie and here 
is what we are thinking:

1) All names that look, sound and smell like a scientific name should be 
created as NameObjects. This is because:
a) Someone may have used them as part of a concept or concepts somewhere.
b) They may or may not be erroneous. We can't say don't mark up the 
erroneous ones as NameObjects because you might not know they are erroneous.

2) The PublicationStatus element can be used as a human readable note in 
NameObjects to indicate that a name is a orthographic variant of another 
name. Other than this there should not be name-name links to indicate 
misspellings.

3) To mark up a misspelling one should create a link between two 
TaxonConcepts. This is because:
a) For an author to misspell a name they must have used it to refer to a 
concept of some kind that it would be useful to reason about.
b) The person who misspelled the name should be in the according to.
c) If the author misspelled a name when they initially published it 
(e.g. wrong gender)  there may be some concepts that use the incorrect 
spelling and some that use the correct spelling. All these concepts 
should be capable of being related to each other in terms of set 
relationships.

In order to do 3 there needs to be a 'is misspelling of' concept 
relationship type that is currently missing from the schema. This was 
formerly 'is orthographic variant of' but had been removed in the great 
move round. This relationship will be added back in for version 0.95.3

Attached is an instance document marked up in that way. The one I posted 
before was 'interesting' but perhaps incorrect :) and some people seem 
to have got a mangled version of it anyhow. Please let me know if you 
can't read this one.

This is all good stuff. Finding bugs is what we want to do so we know we 
are starting to test the thing.

Enjoy,

Roger


-- 

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 Roger Hyam
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 Biodiversity Informatics
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