[Taxacom] taxonomy and the future of web based tools

[Doug Yanega]

>I would argue, that this means that to be part of this future, we must make
>sure that all our information (publications, databases. Etc) will be open
>and available so can take profit of this development.. At that point, we
>can't rely on email sent pdfs, but really ought to be able to provide access
>to our information so somebody could ask questions such as "are ants really
>declining above 1600 meters above sea level in the tropics and  are there
>general patterns involved?"

Unfortunately, however, this requires that we establish an 
authoritative information source, and that your query only searches 
THAT. There is far more misinformation on the web than truth, and a 
data-mining algorithm cannot separate one from the other. Just 
imagine what happens if your question is: "Does the Loch Ness monster 
exist?" or "Do hobo spider bites cause necrotic lesions?". The answer 
to both is a resounding NO, but you'll have a hard time determining 
that, given what's on the web right now.

The phenomenon has been dubbed "wikiality" (a term coined on "The 
Colbert Report"), basically defined as "Reality is whatever Wikipedia 
says it is". Colbert suggested that all people had to do was, for 
example, visit the Wikipedia entry on elephants and edit it so that 
it said that there were 6 times as many elephants alive today as 
there were a decade ago, and that would become the new reality. Of 
course, the people who edit Wikipedia (like myself) were on top of 
it, and despite thousands of attempted acts of sabotage, the entry 
for "elephant" remains unaltered - nonetheless, despite Wikipedia's 
remarkable "immune system", the REST of the web contains lots of 
nonsense. I can imagine "Web 3.0" leading to all sorts of disasters 
when (for example) someone asks for medical advice and the answer 
they get is based on home remedies (due to there being more such web 
pages) or based on which drug company has spent the most money to get 
the Web 3.0 algorithm to suggest their product. Instead of 
advertising to the consumer, the advertisers will only need to trick 
the search program into selecting their prooduct over their 
competitors'.

I'd like to see some assurance that this marvelous search engine will 
know a lie when it spots one.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        /Dept. of Entomology         /Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521-0314
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82