More GBIF questions (was: ITIS)

[Richard.Zander at MOBOT.ORG]

I'm surprised that Rod Page's "definition of a classification is a tree" got
by, or maybe I missed something. Check the dictionary.

It is especially interesting and heartening that the complex exchanges of
this thread do not seem to need to involve this issue, but the solutions
work (however well or poorly) whether a classification is a tree or not.

As long as we distinguish nomenclature from taxonomic opinion, we advance in
this thread. You would think, though, wouldn't you, that there was some
agreed upon level of confidence in taxonomic opinion that databases of
taxonomic opinion could reflect. How might that level of confidence be
gauged? We've complained about situations in which there was a clear lack of
confidence, and seem to be able to identify those readily, but under what
conditions do we mostly agree?


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Richard H. Zander
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-----Original Message-----
From: Roderic Page [mailto:r.page at BIO.GLA.AC.UK]
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 3:43 AM
To: TAXACOM at LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU
Subject: Re: [TAXACOM] More GBIF questions (was: ITIS)


Regarding the problem of authoritative lists of names, clearly our
current lists have errors. These affect not only names, but
classifications. By definition a classification is a tree, but the
animal and plant classifications in ITIS are not trees (which is why
the Glasgow Name Server only displays trees for names from NCBI). In
the case of ITIS these errors are worrying because ITIS data are used
in other databases, such as Species 2000, uBio, the Glasgow Name
Server, and the SEEK project.

I suspect the way forward is to adopt the tools and mindset of the Open
Source software community. Have open databases of names that people can
annotate (i.e., report "bugs"). The bugs themselves can be seen by (and
commented on by) everybody. Hence, the error mentioned by Richard Petit
(the type species of the genus Cancellaria being attributed to Pilsbry,
1940 instead of to Linnaeus, 1767) would be visible for all to see (and
comment on).

Regards

Rod

Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor Elect, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
www: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html