[Taxacom] formation of zoological names with Mc, Mac, etc.

[Paul J. Morris]

On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:39:25 +0100
"Francisco Welter-Schultes" <fwelter at gwdg.de> wrote:
> Taxon name author strings (genus-species-author-year) are used as 
> global unique identifiers for species

This is false.  If you use only those four elements you are guaranteed
to have non-unique identifiers.  To have a high  likelihood of being
able to uniquely specify a name you need at least 9 elements: genus,
specific epithet, subspecific epithet, infrasubspecific epithet,
authorship (including initials), year of publication, presence of
parenthesies, page, plate, and figure.   

Trying to group data into species using taxon name strings that include
only a subset of the necessary nomenclatural information guarantees
that many of your groups will contain information about multiple
species.   Nomenclature is complex and is full of pathological
examples.  

-Paul
-- 
Paul J. Morris
Biodiversity Informatics Manager
Harvard University Herbaria/Museum of Comparative Zoölogy
mole at morris.net  AA3SD  PGP public key available