An official US Federal Taxonomy?

[James H. Beach]

On ITIS --

Everyday in every collection and in every desktop and institutional
database, we work with unique classifications.  Biological collections use
one classification to shelve specimens, researchers use another for their
view of the groups they work on, some societies have classifications,
government agencies have theirs.  As an enterprise (and as humans!), we are
swimming in classifications, especially if you consider the numerous
publications which go into a 'single classification' of a higher rank of
organisms, e.g. the birds, the mammals.  So really we have thousands if not
millions of 'component classifications' to manage, if we want to accurately
record the taxonomic history of life on earth.  Most of the time, most of
us are pretty content to runaround with a kind of general, consensus
classification in our heads or in our project or cataloging databases for
the groups we need to deal with.

What the US federal agencies are trying to do with ITIS is to eliminate the
problems caused by having multiple classifications for the same organisms
across US federal agencies.  In the recent past, NOAA, NASA, USDA, EPA,
USGS, etc. managed taxonomic names and classifications independently and
when compared across agencies, inconsistently.  So ITIS is attempting to
bring some taxonomic and nomenclatural order to the federal house for legal
and policy use for US organisms.  Yes, the names and the concepts behind
them will likely change through time (assuredly they all will).

But before we dig in as anti-federal, anti-government, rugged individual
survivalists, i.e. Texans, (just kidding!), and start criticizing them for
taking that on, consider the legal chaos caused by no coordination within
the government.  ITIS is an attempt to support federal agencies with a
consistent reference taxonomy of stable names.  It was not modeled or
designed at the onset to support the millions of overlapping and often
conflicting micro classifications that go into the tree of life.  Don't
shoot ITIS for trying to improve the quality of taxon data for federal
agency use.

If as researchers, we need an informatics architecture that handles
multiple classifications, that represents and visualizes them accurately as
an index to bib or specimen data, or to web based information, or for
nomenclatural uses, or for whatever, then we need to model, design,
implement, manage, fund, and sustain such an architecture as a community.
The absence of an international informatics infrastructure for
classifications and our historically low prioritization of the technical
description standards needed to support such an approach is not ITIS's
crime. Let's not hang all of this on ITIS and condemn it for attempting to
reach much narrower and focused objectives.  ITIS is a necessary and
worthwhile piece of a global taxonomic information infrastructure, and we
would be smart as researchers and as a community to support and collaborate
with people from other communities (e.g. federal governments) who are
trying to fund, build and sustain taxonomic informatics infrastructure,
even if it is only part of the global solution.

-- Jim Beach


At 8/28/98 11:20 AM -0700, you wrote:
>Stuart Fullerton wrote:
>>
>> ...we can send ambassadors to argue with folks in other countries
>> as to why they should adopt our standards, and develop a united nations
>> committie of biological and scientific standards and boycott all the
>> nations and countries that do not bend to our standards. what _are_ we
>> giving to our children? get your insect pins out and prepare to defend
>> your territory.  big brother is lurking inside your microscope.
>
>* An 'offical' taxonomy like this would be much less offensive if it were
>to provide diverse published taxonomic *options* for the species (and
>higher?)-level classification of organisms. As far as one can judge from
>the website, the proposed database is to be a sort of super AOU
>Checklist, embodying a single taxonomic arrangement, which will
>inevitablely be the opinions of the consulted authorities at the moment
>the list was last revised. On the prototype list,
>
>http://www.itis.usda.gov/itis/itis_query.cgi
>
>if I want to split Pyganodon off from Anodonta, or recognize Rana
>palustris mansuetti, I'm relegated to INVALID NAME land. A very few
>synonyms are listed, but these aren't 'live' Linnaean synonyms jostling
>for senior status in the case the taxa are differently arranged, they're
>just dead names, presumeablely shown as relicts of previous useage by the
>ill-informed.
>
>The use of a name has always meant (despite widespread misunderstanding
>of lists drawn up by semi-officious bodies) that the user considers the
>name used to be the the senior and otherwise appropriate name for the
>taxon referred to. Many People are all too willing to accept lists and
>classifications as surrogates for responsibility and understanding. Lists
>are a convienence, but they don't absolve authors from personal
>responsibility for endorsing the taxonomic arrangements they use.
>
>If it incorporates a single taxonomy, a giant government taxonomic
>database will become a freedom-destroying strait jacket which will teach
>nonsystematic biologists and the public the wrong lessons about
>systematics and nomenclature. If, on the other hand, such a database
>incorporates (within reasonable limits of time and consensus) a range of
>opinions, referenced to the supporting publications, it could provide an
>important reference and also provide handles for different arrangements
>which result in using the same name for a local population or higher
>taxon.
>
>In a sense, a one-dimensional list of names is like going back to the
>early days of computerization, when we were going to have to abandon
>names, and refer to taxa by numbers that would fit on an 80-column punch
>card, because languages and functions for manupulating alphanumeric
>strings hadn't been invented yet. If this official US Federal Taxonomy is
>just to be a one-dimensional list, it will incorporate neither the
>complexity that modern computer programming is capable of dealing with
>nor traditional systematic practice: if nomenclature is governed by
>rules, it's possible to teach a computer to follow them, and the most
>fundamental rule of nomenclature is freedom to chose the taxonomy you
>believe to be correct.
>
>A database with options would also better serve the goal of indicating
>which organisms names used in US Federal databases refer to: Dendroica
>coronata of the 1957 AOU Checklist is quite a different taxon from D.
>coronata (including D. auduboni) of the 1983 AOU Checklist, and it's not
>always possible (and always labour-intensive) to retrospectively
>'correct' old unvouchered lists to a new list of names.
>
>So whether these thoughts have been useful to anybody else, they've
>suggested to me ways in which our taxonomic dictionary at the EOBM can
>deal with some of these problems.
>
>fred schueler.
>------------------------------------------------------------
>         Eastern    Ontario    Biodiversity    Museum
>                Grenville Co, Ontario, Canada
>(RR#2 Oxford Station, K0G 1T0) (613)258-3107   bckcdb at istar.ca
>------------------------------------------------------------
>

____________________________________________________

James H. Beach
Assistant Director for Informatics
Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center
Dyche Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045
E-mail: jbeach at eagle.cc.ukans.edu
Tel: (785) 864-4645, Fax (785) 864-5335