[tcs-lc] Minor modifications prior TDWG ratification vote

[Richard Pyle]

Hi James,

> Amongst issues raised in TCS meeting at St. Petersburg would be
> reported by Jessie or Roger, what could be fall boundary between minor
> and major is "whear could we put incertae sedis information?".  Since
> incertae sedis is a status of relationship  between a taxon and its
> ungiven higher taxon, one possible implementation is addition of
> "incertae sedis" relationship type to enumeration and make
> Relationship/ToTaxonConcept minOccurs zero. Another way is to
> implement as a status of TaxonConcept, parhaps by adding a boolean
> attribute to TaxonConcept.

I have never thought of "incertae sedis" as a property unto itself. Rather,
I have treated it as a condition, where the difference in taxonomic rank of
a child taxon name and its immediate parent taxon name exceeds a threshold
level (e.g., a genus name is indicated as having an immediate parent
assigned to a name that is of rank "order", with no indication of
family-rank parent).

Is there a definition of "incertae sedis" that is not directly derived from
the relationship between the rank of a child name and the rank of its
immediate parent name?  What is the utility of defining "incertae sedis"
explicitly, rather than deriving it?  It seems to me a Concept cannot be
considered "incertae sedis" without the context of its parent (and the
nomenclatural rank of the name assigned to its parent), and therefore can
always be derived be comparing name-rank of child concept and name-rank of
parent concept.

> Another "could be major" raised is addition of "other" (or
> "unapplicable" or whatever) relationship type to pass regeression
> test, i.e. export from and inport to the same data strubutre via TCS.
> If data provide has a relationship type not listed in the
> enumeration, the draft schema does not allow to express it so
> the schema would fail regresstion test.  Even with "other"
> relationship type, providers can't differenciate two or more
> relationship types in ther data, so we need an optional  modifier
> to put these subtypes.  See item 0000011 on Roger's tracker at
> http://tracker.hyam.net/view.php?id=11
> It would be necessary to state clearly in the schema that the subtype
> may be ignored if relationship type is other than "other".

Could you provide an example to illustrate how the "other" relationship type
and its corresponding modifier would be used?

Aloha,
Rich