[Taxacom] RSS feeds for new (or newly digitised) names

[Bob Mesibov]

Rod Page wrote:

"So, the real task here is to figure out how we make progress. There  
are lots of people working in this area, but I think there are  
obstacles, much of it rooted in the lack of access to data, and the  
lack of tools to fix the obvious errors.

If we dumped everything we had into a wiki, and let the community  
clean/annotate/fix/add to it, I think we'd resolve a lot of these  
issues..."

Are Wolfgang and Rod asking too much? The goal here seems to be an all-taxon biodiversity resource for taxonomists (and some others). Is the 'community' Rod refers to the world's set of taxonomists? Or the subset of taxonomists worldwide, aided by very capable bioninformatics specialists, who've been working so hard in recent years to compile all-taxon digital resources?

Meanwhile, specialist taxonomy groups have been doing their own library work, compiling very complete and handy online resources for their special taxa, and more such projects are in progress or contemplated. These digital resources are of enormous value to the specialists, but of little value to non-specialists. The compilations I know about don't suffer that much from messes, either: the specialists who compile them have agreed on a 'point of view' with regard to uncertain names and concepts. The sifting and winnowing of names and literature has been done by humans, not machines.

It may be that having these resources makes the taxa concerned more attractive for study by the next generation of taxonomists, too. That would make all-taxon resources a gap-filler for those taxa which haven't had the benefit of specialist TLC, but I don't see why the existence of such resources would make previously unattractive taxa more attractive to work on.

I guess what I'm concerned about is this: in 2009 there seem to be two paths towards making taxonomic information universally and conveniently avalilable. On one path there are specialists producing 'authoritative', frequently updated resources for themselves and their fellow workers. On the other path are all-taxon projects struggling with both settled and unsettled taxonomies, with variable success in keeping up to date, for a target audience of....?

Vishwas Chavan is asking 'scientific institutions, multi-lateral organisations, national, regional and global funding agencies, academicians, and citizen scientists' to participate in a GBIF Content Needs survey. Good to ask a wide range of people what they want. The specialist resources seem to be satisfying the needs of the specialists, though. I suppose you could argue that the all-taxon resources will save specialists a lot of work in compiling their own resources, but then the *specialists* will and should be doing the fiddly bits, not machines.
-- 
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
Ph (03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
Webpage: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html