[Tcs-lc] Taxonomic order anyone?

Roger Hyam roger at hyam.net
Tue Mar 29 07:56:35 PST 2005


Gregor Hagedorn wrote:

>>I am not suggesting we actually do these things with TCS but it should 
>>be able to do the list bit of each. Suppose we want to supply a list of 
>>birds of the British isles for use in a survey and we want to put them 
>>in the same order as in the main field guide. Are you saying TCS should 
>>not be able to do it? I would imagine that other schemas will supply 
>>descriptive and other detail but surely TCS should be doing the "These 
>>taxa in this order and this is what they are called" part. 
>>    
>>
>
>Well yes. I just think it is  a very limited application, just expressing the 
>sequence of occurrence. I would imagine to make that fieldguide-sequence more 
>meaningful, you would very soon also like to have the pagination and headings 
>present - which is why I thought it easily is too much for TCS and more 
>appropriate for Flora/Fauna markup or online-monograph standards on a higher 
>level (reusing the types of the other standards).
>  
>
I am not talking about reproducing the field guide here but about 
reproducing the classification presented in the field guide. Your 
recording sheet for an area survey should be in the same order as your 
field guide. It may not contain as many taxa because your field guide 
may cover a larger region it would just contain the names you can tick 
but it should be in the correct order. This is the kind of thing people 
like ITIS in North America or NBN in the UK or even Species 2000 might 
like to do in the future.

>However, if you want to express sequence I believe it is  sufficient to agree 
>that the order of elements in the instance document must be preserved and is 
>semantic. I would not like to load all data exchange with this agreement, 
>however, since it is a severe burden on many potential uses of name or concept 
>data. So if data go from original provider through several processes in a 
>chain, I believe it would be unwise to require all of them to preserve order.
>
>  
>
>(Unfortunately, w3c schema really lacks any mechanism to express this. RDF has 
>seq, set, and bag types for this, but to me - as biologist - it seems more 
>appropriate as part of the schema).
>
>  
>
Just putting the taxon concepts in a nested hierarchy expresses this 
perfectly and solves the pointer problems as well. Pointers are just 
used for cross classification associated taxa (non-homotypic synonym). 
Easy to generate, easy to parse, easy to read I think.

Anyhow I'll put something together along those lines and see if it flies :)

>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
>
>_______________________________________________
>Tcs-lc mailing list
>Tcs-lc at ecoinformatics.org
>http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/mailman/listinfo/tcs-lc
>
>  
>

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