[tcs-lc] RE: LC/TCS - How many schemas?

[Kennedy, Jessie]

Rich said: 
>How do you distinguish between an "Identification" and direct 
>reference to a
>Voucher in the context of a Concept definition?  Are these 
>fundamentally
>different things, in your mind?
>
yes - they are different in my mind. 
A direct reference to a Voucher in the context of a Concept definition means the taxonomist who defined the concept actaully used that Voucher in his work (now we may or may not have this information for legacy concepts apart from type Vouchers - but could encourage the practice for new ones). 
An identification may or may be have been by the same author of the Concept, but regardless the specimen but was not actually used during the process of defining the Concept.  If the identification was by the same author some people might say that he is extending the circumscription of the Concept and they should be included, but I'd say to keep things clean and avoid possible Concept drift they should still be counted as identifications and if and when he thinks it appropariate he might revise his definition of the Concept and include some of those earlier identifications in his new definition of the Concept. If the identification was by a different author then these should certainly be kept different.

>> I just think it makes a statement about how precise you are in
>> your identifications - if you know names mean different things
>> then you should say what you meant
>
>I COMPLETELY agree -- and the world would certainly be a much 
>better place
>if all (or even a substantial number of) existing identifications were
>"self-mapped" in this way.  But the reality is that they are not.
>
so if we don't know what they mean make that clear by using a nominal concept that can clearly be interpretted as ambigous in meaning rather than tagging a name and pretending the problem doesn't exist.

Jessie