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

[Richard Pyle]

Fancisco mistakenly sent this post only to me, and he asked that I forward
it to the list.  I will reply in a moment.

Aloha,
Rich 

-----Original Message-----
From: Francisco Welter-Schultes [mailto:fwelter at gwdg.de] 
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 4:10 AM
To: Richard Pyle
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] formation of zoological names with Mc, Mac, etc.

Rich,
thanks for this useful and enlighting discourse on the nature of
identifiers. 

But I still did not really understand the exact difference between what you
call natural and surrogate keys. Maybe an example would be good to get the
exact differences.

If I understood you correctly,

Helix aspersa O.F. Müller, 1774 should be a human identifier. Others would
be Helix aspersa O. F. Müller, 1774, Helix aspersa Mueller, 1774, Helix
aspersa Müller, 1774, Helix aspersa O. Müller 1774, Helix aspersa OF Müller,
1774 or Helix aspersa Müller O.F. 1774 .

Natural keys? or surrogate keys?:

Helix aspersa Müller, 1774
Helix aspersa Müller 1774
helix-aspersa-müller-1774
helix_aspersa_müller_1774
helix-aspersa-muller-1774
helix_aspersa_muller_1774
helix_aspersa_muller_1774_01
helix_aspersa_muller_1774_p0059_01
helix_aspersa_muller_1774_used
helix_aspersa_muller_1774_p0059_01_orig
helix_aspersa_muller_1774_p0059_01_used
hel7829_asp28473_mull747634
378thua3p4uht9p8q3ht
h139857138957187
11702

A shortcoming of numeral keys is that errors cannot easily be recognized by
humans, and that a central source must be consulted to combine the name of
the species with the key. So I am asking myself if surrogate keys can
combine elements of natural keys, in a way that each databaser and
taxonomist would be able to create them easily without involving the time
consuming process of consulting a central source. For that I would need to
understand better where exactly you draw the line between a natural and a
surrogate key.

I could imagine that a databaser who likes to send out to another database
information connected to 20,000 names of currently used specific taxa could
easily create an automatic program to convert data of 4 fields (1) Helix (2)
aspersa (3) Müller (4) 1774 to produce a key helix_aspersa_muller_1774_used,
and the recipient would understand this key. 
I imagine this could be superior to a system in which the two involved
partners needed to consult a central source to find the globally used
identifiers for the 20,000 names.

Francisco


University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org