[Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature

Thu Oct 8 17:44:10 CDT 2009

I would normally tend to agree with you on your general point, except for
the fact that the millions of existing communities that (attempt to) manage
literature/citation data (as well as their associated GUIDs) fail
spectacularly to meet the needs of the biodiveristy community (at least the
part of the community that I operate in).  My sense is that the reason our
community has dragged its feet for so long in this domain is that we all
thought/assumed/hoped that the problems would already have been addressed by
the library (or some other) community.  I'm tired of waiting; and indeed,
other efforts are now being held up by this inexplicable void.

I don't mean open access of *literature*, I mean open access of *citation
metadata* (as well as cross-links to name-usages).  We'll eventually get
open-access availability of the actual literature content through efforts
like Plazi/Innotaxa (which some argue would side-step copyright).  But
that's another thing we can't afford to wait for.  What we need in
scientific name/name-usage space now is a consistent, persistent, and
adequately granular vocabulary, schema, and data model so we can stop
replicating effort again and again and again and again (and again and again
and again) for every nomenclatural database.

A citation data model may not help you (or many others), but it's absolutely
necessary in order to unambiguously reconcile taxon name/usage/concept data
-- and like I said, more than anything else (including lack of funding),
it's holding us back on progress.

My apologies if I seem exacerbated, but...well.....after more than 20 years
of waiting for somebody else to sort this out, I'm not so interested in
waiting anymore.

Aloha,
Rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roderic Page [mailto:R.Page at bio.gla.ac.uk] 
> Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 6:30 PM
> To: Richard Pyle
> Cc: 'TAXACOM'
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature
> 
> Dear Rich,
> 
> Glad you like it. I'm a little wary of our community 
> developing yet another domain-specific resource, 
> bibliographic space is pretty crowded with some increasingly 
> sophisticated and well-resourced tools (e.g., Zotero and 
> Mendeley). And we have lots of GUIDs already (DOIs, Handles, 
> ISSNs, URLs) that we seem perversely determined not make  use 
> of. Open Access is cool, but this won't apply to a great 
> chunk of literature for some time. Personally I'm more 
> concerned that it is digitised (and has a digital identifier).
> 
> Not sure a citation data model helps a great deal. What we 
> need are identifiers, and tools to resolve, mint, and 
> discover them. We also need to link names to these identifiers.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Rod
> 
> On 8 Oct 2009, at 17:06, Richard Pyle wrote:
> 
> >
> > Thanks, Rod -- this is great stuff!
> >
> > With regard to this comment:
> >
> >> The point of this exercise is to explore how easy it is to go from 
> >> articles (such as we might have in bibliographies of taxa, say in
> >> EndNote) to the corresponding content in BHL. The major limiting 
> >> factor is access to bibliographies of articles, ideally we'd need 
> >> fairly complete lists of articles for journals to make significant 
> >> progress. If anybody has bibliographies (e.g., EndNote files) that 
> >> have lots of articles from journals scanned by BHL and are 
> willing to 
> >> share them I'd be happy to try and map them to BHL and make the 
> >> results available.
> >
> > We are right now (as in, starting last week, through the end of the
> > month-ish) contemplating a common data model for literature 
> citations, 
> > based on the work of the TDWG Literature group in conjunction with 
> > efforts by GNA/GNUB and BHL to establish a common 
> "CitationBank", with 
> > shared GUIDs and open access to full content.  The idea 
> (hope?) is to 
> > expand the discussion on the draft citation data model to a broader 
> > group of people between now and the TDWG meeting in early November 
> > (please let me know if you want to participate), then 
> perhaps by TDWG 
> > the model will be stable enough to implement at both BHL and GNUB.
> >
> > In my opinion, the current lack of a common repository for 
> literature 
> > citations (with broadly shared & implemented GUIDs) is the primary 
> > barrier to populating GNUB and/or cross-linking existing taxonomic/ 
> > nomenclatural databases.
> >
> > Thanks, again, Rod!
> >
> > Aloha,
> > Rich
> >
> >
> >
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> >
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> 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
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