[tcs-lc] Let's not bother with the codes any more :)

Roger Hyam roger at hyam.net
Thu Mar 10 03:54:04 PST 2005


Hi All,

This is a little light hearted post so don't take it too seriously but 
as with any joke it will only be effective if there is an element of 
truth in it.

In 2005 the taxonomic community unite around a Concept Only based way of 
passing taxonomic data about. Nomenclatural details are passed from 
machine to machine and from biologist to biologist embedded within 
concepts only. (UK joke: passing name data outside a concept is 
punishable by house arrest).

In 2007 agreement is reached to use a central system for administering 
Globally Unique IDs in the form of LSIDs for any TaxonConcept anyone 
wants to publish.

In 2008 FoxNature the natural history publishing wing of a multimedia 
conglomerate publish a book called "Plants and Animals of the World". It 
is really pretty good in parts. Lots of pictures but they only use 
vernacular names, some of which they have made up. FoxNature want their 
book to be widely used so they register all the concepts they use in the 
book, print the LSIDs in the book, put it on the web and give away a 
million copies to educational institutions.

Loads of people start using the book to record data and submitting it to 
the global system.

The penny drops that because we have a new global system for referring 
to concepts there is no longer a need to use Latin names. The breaks are 
off and we decide the trust worthiness of a concept on the basis of an 
amazon.com like review process or brand. No one turns up for the 2010 
International Botanical Congress - after all what role is there for the 
nomenclatural codes in a concept based world?

This is a bit of fun. Clearly it wouldn't happen because we would have a 
system to ensure that people linked concepts to other concepts that were 
'Original Concepts' that contained a type specimen. We are doing this 
aren't we?! All concepts must point to Original Concepts unless you are 
an Original Concept. Can some one work out how to do that conditional 
bit in the schema :)

The fact that we appear to have over looked this (I may be wrong but I 
can't see the mechanism in the TCS and I haven't had a chance to check 
your schema thoroughly Rich I am afraid) worries me. There have been a 
lot of us looking at this for a while now. Are we loosing track of why 
the codes came about in the first place and why they are separate in the 
real world and hence why it might be a good idea to model them 
separately in the virtual world?

I am just trying to come at this from some other angles here.

Roger

-- 

==============================================
 Roger Hyam
----------------------------------------------
 Biodiversity Informatics
 Independent Web Development 
----------------------------------------------
 http://www.hyam.net  roger at hyam.net
----------------------------------------------
 2 Janefield Rise, Lauder, TD2 6SP, UK.
 T: +44 (0)1578 722782 M: +44 (0)7890 341847
==============================================


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: roger.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 275 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/pipermail/tcs-lc/attachments/20050310/24d8753c/roger.vcf


More information about the Tcs-lc mailing list