[Taxacom] progress on globalnames.org

Wed May 13 04:42:13 CDT 2009

Hi Paul,

Of course you are right - there are areas of IRMNG that are not perfect or complete - especialy at species level and above-generic level (which are not my initial target) - in particular I have not yet included species level updates from Cat. of Life (including names from Index Fungorum no doubt) subsequent to 2006 - to be done as time and / or enthusiasm available...

However my focus is to try to enable a whole-of-biota view which is not available from the specialist GSDs or regional treatments - including identifying homonyms across different groups and kingdoms, habitat and extant/fossil flags, identifying spelling variants, and more - which as you will be aware are not available from either Cat. of Life, uBio NameBank or elsewhere, or at least in any coherent manner. Basically I am trying to "tag" genera with useful attributes and the higher classification does not have to be perfect or even up to date for this - it's horses for courses I guess. Ultimately I would also like to be able to integrate latest content available via a GNA etc. which should reduce or eliminate these correctness / synchronisation issues, but one has to start somewhere.

While of course I take criticisms on board (and have come to expect them where justified - which is no doubt in many respects), my main purpose in putting my own head up here is to show some of the things that an integrated database aggregation approach does make possible, especially for sorting out genus level characteristics across multiple taxonomic groups. As stated above, it is by no means perfect or complete, but already a useful resource for some purposes (including checking your spelling!), or more properly, for disinguishing between potential marine and nonmarine taxa.

This is of course in no way deprecatory of your own fine efforts in the fungal domain, or the other GSDs, just an illustration of some added value when one attempts to perform higher level integration of such information and also manage it within a relational environment (which as I understand it is bot the initial aim of the GNA).

Regards - Tony

________________________________________
From: Paul Kirk [p.kirk at cabi.org]
Sent: Wednesday, 13 May 2009 5:45 PM
To: Rees, Tony (CMAR, Hobart); taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] progress on globalnames.org

It's fine building your own but ...

Why do it when others are (e.g. for Fungi)?
Users might think what you are serving is corrent and up to date (try
Nias in Index Fungorum and IRMNG - there are three species,
Pyrenomycetes went out of use in the late 70's, and the correct order is
Microascales)

OK, my hean is now above the battlements ... ;-)

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of
Tony.Rees at csiro.au
Sent: 13 May 2009 08:31
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] progress on globalnames.org

Rod Page wrote:

>> Am I the only horrified by this timescale?

Dear Rod, all,

I'm not too keen on the timescale either - that's why I built my own :-)

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/irmng/

Of course this is a database approach not a wiki, but I would argue that
a database approach is actually the only way to go so as to re-use data
entered at higher taxonomic levels at the levels below, and also impose
the necessary rigour (as well as searchability and ease of
scrutiny/maintenance of the entered content).

WoRMS have combined a database approach with distributed editing via a
pool of authorised users - see http://www.marinespecies.org/about.php ,
which seems like a good combination to me, and better in a number of
respects than a wiki (like the latter is based on unstructured text,
also pages are locked to a hierarchy via the URL paths which is not so
good).

Of course maintaining a system like the above comes with its own
overheads - I am looking forward to GNA / ZooBank / Cat. of Life
completion as much as anyone, so I can get back to doing all the other
things I am actually supposed to do!

- Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page
Sent: Wednesday, 13 May 2009 5:04 PM
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
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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