[tcs-lc] Taxonomic Product or Taxonomic Data

Paul Kirk p.kirk at cabi.org
Sat Mar 5 14:13:10 PST 2005


I would suggest that we need to go a bit higher than that ;-)

Have we defined anywhere what services an implementation of the TCS/LC should provide? It seems to me that we cannot decide on scope until we decide on services/outputs.

Do we envisage a tool that will suck up data associated with taxonomic opinions from a number of sources (databases, e-monographs, XML'ed printed sources etc, selected because they are all using the same name or because they all contain the same name in their name set: accepted name and synonyms), push it into our schema and then tell us whether all the sources refer to the same taxon? Or is it something else?

To close this short post I cannot resist a comment on a phrase in Rogers previous post (with my pedants cap firmly on). He says 'because it is a list of names not taxa'. If by 'name' he means a character string as a product of a nomenclatural act this is by definition a taxon as recognized by the author of the name - remember taxonomy (the recognition of taxa) comes before nomenclature. So, how do we recognize a list of names from a list of taxa? Is it when someone other than the person who published the name uses it?

Cheers,

Paul




-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Hyam
To: tcs-lc at ecoinformatics.org
Sent: 05/03/05 21:21
Subject: [tcs-lc] Taxonomic Product or Taxonomic Data

Hi Everyone,

This may seem like quite an high level topic and you will have to excuse

me if this ground has already been covered but I am trying to nail down 
the scope of the TCS/LC schema a little more in my own mind and need to 
gather opinions on the high level goals.

Are we passing the product of taxonomic research or raw taxonomic data?

Either:

1) We imagine taxonomists doing their work and then publishing the 
results using the TCS/LC schema. Basically publishing taxon concepts, 
when to use them, what to call them and how they relate, what can and 
can't be said about data tagged with different names and concepts etc. 
We probably have about this level of coverage in the schema at the
moment.

2) We imagine taxonomists publishing everything they do using the 
schema. Every specimen examined and what it was identified as. All the 
'agents' they know about and the different teams they have worked in and

how their names have been abbreviated and where they have collected etc 
etc. The nitty gritty of stuff that would be very useful for some one 
producing a monographic revision to have to hand but that an ecologist 
or biomedical prospector wouldn't care about at all.

I think that some of the discussions that we are having at the moment 
would be resolved if we had a definite policy on which of these two 
approaches we were following.

I'd be grateful for peoples thoughts on this. I consider 2 to include 1 
so there is no option of saying we want to do both!

Best regards,

Roger






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