List order (was: Maximum Taxon names within a single Parent)

[Richard Pyle]

Barry Roth Wrote:

> My question is why would one wish to
> capture this sequence information -- misguided, in my opinion --
> in the first place.

That's a good question.  As I've explained in other off-list communication
related to this, I'm not necessarily advocating the practice.  My only
concern is with a mechanism to capture it in database form.

As to your question....well, I guess the best reasons that I can think of
for capturing mostly relate to the fact that it is a prototypical way of
representing interpreted phylogeny (either before the days of cladograms, or
by those "classical" taxonomists who, while rejecting the practice of
cladistics and the cladograms often associated with it, nevertheless often
have profound insight into what intra-rank relationships might be).

When I wear my data-capturer's hat, my philosophy is that if information is
right there in front of me, and it's very easy to capture along-side more
meaningful/useful information that I'm capturing anyway, then I might as
well design my data-capture tool to allow me to easily grab that information
while it's easy -- even if I don't have a clear idea of how that information
might be used after it's captured.  I could hazard some guesses as to how
this information might be useful to have at my fingertips -- but right now,
I'm looking at it more as an opportunity to almost transparently capture
extra information while going trough the much more tedious task of capturing
taxonomic Assertions from published literature.

Aloha,
Rich