[Taxacom] progress on globalnames.org

[Paul Kirk]

I guess there are reasons for the 'decadally' estimate.

First, all the major taxon groups have different problems (except
bacteria and archaea) - fungi, much  missing basic data in IF; plants ,
still much duplication in IPNI; 'animals', many small databases (one big
one not 'open source'). Second, most are in structured (more or less)
databases and yes, pushing it all into a wiki could work but doesn't
this lead to more duplication via the 'replication and divergence'
phenomenon. Perhaps my lack of understanding of the structure of a wiki
means I overestimate the difficulty with which an annotation (filling in
the missing data for the fungi, for example) gets back into the the
database. Or perhaps we should just abandon databases and push
everything we need into a wiki?

Being an optimist I would say we could have something approaching
completeness in a couple of years ... assuming everyone involved wants
to play and doesn't expect someone else to bring the ball - by that I
mean the required minumum resources can be found. Taking advantage of
these minimal resources there will be a presentation and demo of one
part of the GNA (the GNUB) at the e-biosphere in just under three weeks
... OMG is it that soon ... ;-(

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page
Sent: 13 May 2009 08:04
To: David Patterson
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] progress on globalnames.org

Am I the only horrified by this timescale?

On 12 May 2009, at 16:45, David Patterson wrote:

>
> Expectation management:  How long before this all operational? Best to

> think decadally.
>

Why can't we have this sooner? Like, *cough*, now? Is it crazy to
suggest that if all these names were dumped in a wiki, together with
annotations (e.g., links to literature), any our community set about
adding/annotating/cleaning, we could have this done rather sooner...?

Rod



---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
DEEB, FBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
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Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html







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