[Taxacom] saturday morning fun

Mon Nov 29 04:03:43 CST 2010

Stephen, it's because the CoL compilors are human and humans (at least most of them) make mistakes ...

Have you contacted the database custodian directly about the error?

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Stephen Thorpe
Sent: 28 November 2010 21:29
To: David Remsen (GBIF); Wolfgang Lorenz
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] saturday morning fun

>4. The Catalogue of Life asserts that the genus Mimus is is both a bird 
>and a weevil  (one accepted and one provisionally so).

so, why oh why are they both listed as accepted names on this GBIF page???
http://data.gbif.org/species/13160516/

________________________________
From: David Remsen (GBIF) <dremsen at gbif.org>
To: Wolfgang Lorenz <faunaplan at googlemail.com>
Cc: "taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu" <Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Mon, 29 November, 2010 5:34:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] saturday morning fun

The explanation I can give for this instance, and on which I will try to provide more detail in a following mail, is this:

1.  The Catalogue of Life, with IPNI and Index Fungorum,  provide the ONLY 'taxonomic authority' we have at our means to improve the vastly inconsistent and messy GBIF primary data index. (the 264M records that originate in ~8000 natural history collections/observational data.)

2.  These 'authorities'  only directory overlap taxa in a minority of the data.  To answer questions like "what Coleoptera exist in the index" requires deriving a taxonomy based on taxonomic information from the original sources and building a classification based on some simple rules.  We use these sources and rules to build a more comprehensive classification that is inclusive of all the data.  It's either that or we cannot report on around half the data in the index.

3.  Given that homonyms (we called them homographs) exist we need to account for them which is highly problematic.  One rule however, is that we try to limit homonyms to one per Kingdom.

4. The Catalogue of Life asserts that the genus Mimus is is both a bird and a weevil  (one accepted and one provisionally so).  Based on our rules, the artificial higher taxonomy we assembled appears to have limited the Animalia to one valid Mimus and placed all Animal Mimus into the weevils.

http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2010/browse/tree/id/2327040
http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2010/browse/tree/id/2302153

This is how it appears to me though I am trying to look into the specific reason.  We recognise the methodology and the sources we use to derive this merged taxonomic backbone is problematic and have been working for almost a year now to fix it in our development portal. We will do better.

The simplest way to help us fix the organisation of these data would be to

1) provide access to taxonomic authority files to GBIF.  We released a call last week for funds to evaluate our taxonomic checklist format and use this to publish taxonomic data in an international standardised format.  Any data we can access in this format that is asserted to be authoritative would be used to improve precision and recall in our portal.

http://www.gbif.org/communications/news-and-events/showsingle/article/gbif-awards-for-evaluating-checklist-publication-format/

2) Propose a better methodology for organising the data and help implement it.  I can pass anyone interested a data file illustrating what the 'taxonomy' in our raw data looks like but I don't think many of you would be prepared for it.  However, we would be happy to consider directing some of our 2011 budget for focusing on these issues toward ideas.  While you might think it's millions in reality you need to remove a zero and subtract from there.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Remsen, Senior Programme Officer
Electronic Catalog of Names of Known Organisms Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
Tel: +45-35321472  Fax: +45-35321480
Mobile +45 28751472
Skype: dremsen
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