[Taxacom] ZooBank website

[Roderic Page]

Is it just me, or is this actually woefully disappointing?

1. The site is "pretty", but is designed for people to play with, not  
do anything serious (such as download lots of records -- there is no  
interface for automated querying).

2. The literature listed is simply given as a title, which is of  
limited use. Why not link to identifiers such as DOIs? For example,  
if I search on the ant Pachycondyla apicalis, I get publications such  
as "Hydrocarbon distribution and colony odour homogenisation in  
Pachycondyla apicalis". Now, if I want to read this I have to Google  
the title. Duh! It would be trivial for the programmers to add a link  
to the DOI (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00040-003-0669-1) (and I do  
mean trivial).

3. "Welcome to the world's largest online organism names database."  
Largest ... really? uBio has 9,431,945 names, Zoobank has 1,556,652.  
This is some new definition of "largest" that I'm not familiar with.

I don't wish to sound churlish, and I applaud any effort to get  
biodiversity data online, but pretty pictures, a web page of results,  
and a quote from E O Wilson don't make a site truly useful. We've  
been here before...

Regards

Rod


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

Phone: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
iChat: aim://rodpage1962
reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html

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Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org
Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/
Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org
Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com