[Taxacom] Author inclusion or non-inclusion with species names

[Tony.Rees at csiro.au]

To set the record straight re my last comment as below - not meaning to have a dig at Stephen in particular - but this is the task numerous operations have set themselves, only to come up short so far once the magnitude of the job becomes apparent. E.g. - Catalogue of Life (drawing on its excellent contributors) has some 65% of "current" names and a subset of synonyms accessible after how many person-years accumulated activity (tens, hundreds?), only another 35% to go, plus all the synonyms missed, plus all the non-extant species; uBio claims 11+ million names (I think) of which a subset at least are minor spelling or author variants of the same thing, and nobody knows the true number to be indexed out there but my guess would be 20m+ ... basically it's a bit like saying yes, I know how to win the 100 meters world record - all you have to do is run faster than anyone else: easy in theory, a few obstacles in practice.

Maybe the GNA will save us all - but not deal with my problem of today - finding which of the 40k+ Australian marine species names I have on my list are actually the same species variously classified by different sources, or just plain misspelled (hence my appreciation of the value of author names when supplied - giving 4,000 candidates for multiple classification based on identical or near-identical "species epithet plus authority" combination, all to be checked further via numerous scattered resources).

I too look forward to the complete "Catalogue of life and death" (   :-)   ) but not very soon.

Regards - Tony


-----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: Friday, 2 October 2009 5:11 PM
To: s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz; p.kirk at cabi.org
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: [ExternalEmail] Re: [Taxacom] Author inclusion or non-inclusion with species names

Stephen Thorpe wrote:

<snip>
So again, we need a centralised database of synonymic information, but it needn't be anything very complex ...
</snip>

hahahahaha

That's solved then...

- Tony

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