A zoologist asks: botanical names practice

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

It seems to me that instead of adopting 'potential taxa', 'GUIDs', etc, many
of the objectives recently discussed here could be achieved by instituting,
as a good custom, the citation of the latest revision for every species
treated. If all non-taxonomic publications were to do this, this would :
- surely raise taxonomic papers in citation indexes
- fix the species circumscription that is used
- show up for which groups reviews are overdue (hopefully this
would encourage funding)
PvR

----- Original Message -----
From: James Edwards <jedwards at gbif.org>
To: 'Paul van Rijckevorsel' <dipteryx at FREELER.NL>;
<TAXACOM at LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU>
Cc: 'GBIF Scientific Staff' <sci.staff at gbif.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 5:21 PM
Subject: [TAXACOM] Unambiguously identifying taxonomic concepts (was: A
zoologist asks: botanical names practice)


It is for just the reasons cited by Paul van Rijckevorsel that those of us
at the secretariat of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility are more
and more coming to the conclusion that the community needs to have globally
unique identifiers (GUIDs) for taxonomic concepts. We are investigating the
possibility of establishing a service to establish GUIDs for various
entities, including specimens, natural history collections, publications and
taxonomic concepts.

We distributed a short white paper on GUIDs at the recent annual meeting of
the Natural Science Collections Alliance (NSCA), and invite comments on it.
You can view and/or download the paper from the GBIF web site
(http://www.gbif.org/News/NEWS1087475152).

          - Jim

Dr. James L. Edwards
Executive Secretary
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Universitetsparken 15
DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø
DENMARK

Phone:  +45 3532 1470
Fax:      +45 3532 1480

E-mail:   jedwards at gbif.org
URL:      www.gbif.org