[Tcs-lc] Taxonomic order anyone?

[Roger Hyam]

Sorry about this guys - I know I am generating more traffic than I 
should just at the moment but I am running into a bunch of stuff I need 
opinions on.

I see no way of doing taxonomic order in the current TCS. It can be 
implied by document order but because of the way the pointers are set up 
this isn't obvious. If I create a concept for a family it has an ID and 
the genera it contains can come anywhere in the file so long and they 
have references to it and/or it has references to them.
Now we could:

   1. have a convention where the order the taxa appear in the document,
      even if they are not in a contiguous block is their taxonomic
      order. This is messy as you have to keep track of all the taxa all
      the time in case another one is added further down the document.
   2. have the document order of the relationship pointers in the higher
      taxon as the taxonomic order, even if they are not contiguous and
      interspersed with synonym and other relationship pointers. This
      doesn't work if we permit subordinate taxa to point to higher taxa
      without the pointers going the other way or if we allow
      sub-subordinate taxon pointers (e.g. pointing to genera as well as
      to subgenera - see last discussion) which we appear to.
   3. put an ordinal field in each TaxonConcept - but that wouldn't work
      because TaxonConcepts can be pointed to from different higher
      TaxonConcepts and so presumably have different orders in different
      parents.

I see no way of doing it. Anyone got any ideas?

I didn't think this was a major problem till I thought about 
applications like:

   1. Providing a list of taxa in a herbarium or other collection in the
      order they are arrange (any one a curator?)
   2. Providing a representation of a monograph as published.
   3. Providing the layout of a checklist like a field guide.
   4. just about any other application you can think of other than a web
      search interface.

Am I missing something here? Is there a way of doing it?

I am starting to work on a nested hierarchy of taxon objects - it just 
makes things soooo much easier.

As usually I am appreciative of your time and would be grateful for 
peoples thoughts.

Roger

-- 

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 Roger Hyam
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