[tcs-lc] Hybrids

Roger Hyam roger at hyam.net
Fri Apr 29 08:42:09 PDT 2005


Started a new thread on this expanding on Bob's point.

Bob said
---
There is a small gotcha that bit us once. The horticultural code, which 
seems to be incorporated in ICBN by reference , is underspecified on the 
use of the symbol for cross, which in print is sometimes rendered with 
the "multiplication" sign, 0xD7 in unicode hex. Not only is this not in 
the ISO Latin set, but it is unclear to me whether ICBN would treat the 
same string using the ascii character "X" as an orthographic variant or 
not in a printed environment and hence(?) in an electronic environment.
---

Currently the schema does not cover the ICNCP. We chopped some of the 
existing bits out because they were heavily caveated and we intend to 
put them back in for the next version (0.95.3) once they have been 
sorted through. I will be putting something together next week for 
comments but if people have suggestions for the minimum elements we 
could add to give the maximum coverage of cultivated plants please speak up.

Hybrids in scientific names are interesting. In ICBN it is perfectly 
possible for an author to publish a name as a hybrid and another author 
to come along and revise it as not being a hybrid or as having different 
parents. None of this affects nomenclature. One simply adds an X (or 
whatever symbol) if one believes the taxon concept is of hybrid origin 
the name remains unchanged.

Bearing this in mind the way the schema works at the moment is that the 
NameObject has no notion of hybridisation. This is because a single 
NameObject could be used by two different concepts one of which is a 
hybrid and the other isn't.

TaxonConcepts do care about hybrids. They signify this by having 'is 
hybrid child of' relationships with other TCs. They could also have an X 
in their <Name> tag (or a multiplication sign as we are in unicode). A 
user agent could also make sensible decisions on how to render a TC on 
the basis of whether it has hybrid child relationship or not so in away 
whether or not the instance document contains an X or multiplication 
sign doesn't matter - the consumer of the file does what they think 
appropriate with it.

There is an example of a hybrid genus marked up under the IPNI Genera 
examples on the LinneanCoreExampleNames of the LC wiki. Here is a direct 
link to the file:

http://biodiv.hyam.net/schemas/TCS_0.95.2/genera_ipni_01.xml

There are other examples in there as well so don't get confused!

Hope this all makes sense.

Roger




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