[Taxacom] saturday morning fun

[Geoffrey Read]

The original classification of each entry supplied to GBIF should be
trusted more by them. Why would one ever allow shoehorning  records
presented as under Phylum Chordata (and coming from a specialist bird
database) into Phylum Arthropoda? It is not the job of GBIF to second
guess every entry in every museum database on earth, or to resolve
inadequate original data. The providers need to do that. In the case of
the mussel variants (I grant there are probably very much less clear cut
situations) a human could quickly tell that every entry was the same
species. I'm pretty sure a well trained computer could too.

A nice approach at species level (the most important level) would be to
actually show users a table of the variants like the Mytilus edulis
example and let them build their own selection of entries to use in their
query. A select-all button would work fine in that particular case. The
our-algorithms-know-best-what-you-want-and-here-it-is-in-one-big-pureed-data-mix
approach is dismal.

Geoff


>>> On 29/11/2010 at 6:28 a.m., "David Remsen (GBIF)" <dremsen at gbif.org>
wrote:
> 6.  Here is a sample entry for a single species (Mytilus edulis, the
> common blue mussel):
>        http://code.google.com/p/gbif‑ecat/wiki/Nom5ExampleMytilusedulis