[tcs-lc] Names as Objects

[Gregor Hagedorn]

I fully agree with Rich and James conjecture to define name objects at the root 
level and make them referrable by ID.

To me most importantly, this solves my problem with SDD, that people may want 
to use SDD (and closely related, online monograph standards like TaXMLit, 
TaxonX) to CREATE taxon circumscription concepts, rather than referring to 
them. They need, however, refer to a taxon name (and the nomenclatural 
information about publication and status) choosen for the new concept.

I fully see that all such activities could possibly become embedded in TCS, but 
I think this is not the correct level of modularity. I believe even if you 
think you should not neven link legacy data for which only the name object can 
be identified, but the circumscription concept remains unknown to a name, 
having the name as an object does not hurt. It lets the scientific "market 
forces" sort out which is the better solution.

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Closely related, my feeling about much of the discussion whether LC should be 
in TCS is that it misses the point. I think that rather than embedding LC in 
TCS, both name and concept issues, together with specimen and publication, and 
description and ecology, and... issues all belong together. That is what UBIF 
aims at. SDD does not work without much peripheral infrastructure of names, 
taxonomic hierarchy, publications. geography, agents, etc. Rather than 
considering it as part of descriptive data, we tried to push it out into UBIF. 

Now UBIF is far from resolved, it is a discussion platform that needs input. 
And it may be aiming to high, trying to solve too much. My suggestion would be, 
however, to distinguish between a TCS-core that truly deals with taxon 
concepts, and a shell that ties LC, TCS-core, Publications, specimens together. 

UBIF is a somewhat nice term, that Walter Berendsohn, Bob Morris and I came up 
with in a brainstorming session. It would be nice, if the final could be called 
such. To decouple issues, we could:

Call a TCS shell schema that ties things together "UBIF-TCS", and at the same 
time rename current UBIF (as needed for SDD) into "UBIF-SDD". Others could 
follow. Hopefully these "UBIFs" would stay similar enough and learn from each 
other, so that in perhaps 2 years we can revise and merge them into a truly 
common UBIF?

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