[Taxacom] the hurdle for all biodiv informatics initiatives

[Edward Baker]

The search "scratchpads TAXON_NAME" will find any Scratchpads page
mentioning that txon, e.g.: "scratchpads anisomorpha paromalus".

Not ideal but may be useful until the required functionality is developed.

Edward Baker
--------------------
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On 22 February 2010 11:10, <Tony.Rees at csiro.au> wrote:

> Hi Dave,
>
> Thanks for the responses. I'll just amplify one point:
>
> >> - Is it possible to do a single query across multiple Scratchpads,
> >> for a
> >> taxon or taxon name of interest
>
> (you replied:)
> > I can't
> imagine why you'd want to do that though.
>
>
> Well, it mainly concerns names not previously encountered, homonyms, or
> near homonyms. For example in OBIS and GBIF (also many other specimen data
> integration activities) we frequently receive names associated with species
> level data for names we have not previously encountered - and we want to
> know what taxon they might be. If it's a known genus level homonym (let's
> say Ficus) we might need to check both an angiosperm database plus a
> gastropod one, looking for a match on species epithet, preferably as a
> machine level transaction (not a Google search). Or if it is a completely
> new name, just query across all sources. Or if the genus is misspelled
> (which happens quite a lot), know what names are out there that are close to
> the input name - again, could be in any taxonomic group and we probably want
> to see all options...
>
> Currently my approach is to move all possible names into a single space for
> querying, but a distributed search would in principle be more
> efficient/up-to-date, and also permit the detection of newly arriving
> homonyms such as the example Stephen gave.
>
> Regards - Tony
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> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these
> methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:
> mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>