[Taxacom] Occurrence data...

[Richard Pyle]

> AND what the community really needs now is an online collection event
> based gazetteer. So, one can search for "Americae Insulis" and "von Rohr"
> and get the American Virgin Islands.

I think this is a BRILLIANT idea; and one I've never heard of or considered
before.  Basically, like GNA is doing for names, and BHL is doing for
literature, and some initiatives are doing for geographic places...it would
be an "Event Bank" -- an open/common repository for GUID-identified Events,
with annotations of the sort Chris describes. Someone went to a lot of
trouble to work out the von Rohr/Fabricius/St. Croix puzzle. Part of the
problem with our community is that a lot of our time is spent doing
redundant work (another good example is sorting out actual dates of
publication for historic, taxonomically important published works).  

Criticize aggregators all you want, but one thing that they certainly *can*
help with is in eliminating a lot of redundant effort.

Aloha,
Rich