[Taxacom] ZooBank reality check [ Scanned for viruses ]

[Paul Kirk]

I agree with Bobs assessment that some of the comments thus far have been slightly unfair and definitely misguided. Perhaps more could have been done to road test the dataset before the vehicle was launched .. or perhaps some detailed explanation of it's limitations provided.
 
What I would like to pick up on is the 'working taxonomist' continuing to take the trouble to check the original literature. This somewhat 'sterile' but often justified exercise would have been reduced in botany if NCU's had been accepted, at least as far as uncertainty over reference details was concerened, amongst other things. But who has access to ALL the relevant original literature ... outside north america and western europe? Working taxonomists in much of the rest of the world do not have these luxuries so one of the 'other enterprises' Bob referred to must be digitizing - just photographing and NOT in the first instance OCR'ing, parsing, XML'ing etc - the critical literature for each speciality group to create virual Libraries for our colleagues in Africa, South America, eastern Europe, Asia ... And the linking of these images of validating protologues to the names in the relevant nomenclators - free to all.
 
And the proof of how easy it is can be found in the world of Mycology for in a little under two years with just two 'drivers' and a couple of dozen collaborators we have almost 80,000 page images available with 11,300 of these relating to an admitedily small proportion of the 380,000 names in the Index Fungorum database. So you search for your name, click on a link and read the original description, see the illustrations and find out where the type is. This is not rocket science, doesn't have nice brand images but it is all free to the end user. If I hadn't been typing this email I could have scanned a couple of dozen more pages it's that easy. Perhaps Thompson could influence some of the on-line but 'closed' image repositories to release into the public domain the relevant page images of this primary systematic literature?
 
Paul
 
Dr Paul M. Kirk
Biosystematist
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________________________________

From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu on behalf of Bob Mesibov
Sent: Wed 06/09/2006 22:46
To: TAXACOM
Subject: [Taxacom] ZooBank reality check [ Scanned for viruses ]



Interesting that other ZooBank testers haven't had the (so far) satisfactory
results I've had with taxon names per se. Another question is lurking here,
though: who will use ZooBank as an all-purpose name reference, and why?

I'd personally like to believe that working taxonomists will continue to
take the trouble to check the original literature in their specialty group.
They will only go to compilations prepared by the painstaking nit-pickers
who preceded them in their specialty, and even then will be skeptical.
"Taxonomic librarians" compiling vast databases of nomenclatural information
cannot be expected to do this, whether they work for Thomson or the uBio
effort or any other enetrprise.

The original "prospectus" for ZooBank argued that we needed a name registry
for _current_ taxonomic effort. We also (in zoology) need an online Neave,
simply so that we can try to avoid homonymy.

The idea that ZooBank would be an authoritative source for _past_ taxonomy
was something for the future, yet this seems to be what some site visitors
are expecting _now_, which is not only unfair, but misguided.
---
Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195

Tasmanian Multipedes
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/multipedes/mulintro.html
Spatial data basics for Tasmania
http://www.utas.edu.au/spatial/locations/index.html
---


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