[Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

Tue Jul 24 04:24:05 CDT 2012

yes, yes, but then the question becomes twofold: (1) what are you going to do about the dirty data that is *already* in CoL; and (2) why do you think that adding new data is going to result in anything more than addition of further dirty data?

What you seem to be describing (whether it be in plain English or not) is simply the process of data harvesting from your global partners, but I thought this was supposed to be automated? If they have the data, then you should be able to harvest it. Are you paying them now to add more data to their own databases so you can harvest it? This is unclear from what you write ...

Stephen

PS: >I took on this project because I believe that the Catalogue is the nearest thing we currently have to a complete catalogue of the world’s species<
no it isn't ... it may have more data than the others (like Wikispecies), but only because it harvests more dirty data ...

From: Outlook - A.Culham <a.culham at reading.ac.uk>
To: 'Stephen Thorpe' <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; 'Outlook - A.Culham' <a.culham at reading.ac.uk>; 'TAXACOM' <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Cc: p.schalk at eti.uva.nl 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 9:13 PM
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

Stephen,

Please be clear, my responsibility is the i4Life project, not Catalogue of Life as a whole, which has its own, separate, directorate.  I took on this project because I believe that the Catalogue is the nearest thing we currently have to a complete catalogue of the world’s species, that such a catalogue is needed and can act to promote taxonomy generally.  

The i4Life call is to edit/annotate names from the global partner portals that are not in the Catalogue already so you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is written in the call.  We have done our best to ensure the call is in plain English but clearly “In the i4Life project the CoL GSD-Piping Tools will assemble batches of name- and taxon records from the global partner programmes that DO NOT OCCUR in the Catalogue of Life (CoL)” was not sufficient to explain this.  I apologise.

Research is indeed about getting cash to fund it.  The money we have will not fund all the taxonomic work that is needed but it will fund some, and that is better than funding none.  I have participated in three House of Lords reports in the UK into the problems of funding taxonomy.  The fundamental problem is that taxonomy does not generally have the immediate human impact and engagement that politicians controlling funds want to see.  Medicine, social welfare etc are all higher on the political agenda than naming a new species of tropical sedge only ever seen by three people and about go extinct due to logging.  In fact they would probably prefer the species was not described and could therefore not be added to the EW list of IUCN.

I live in a real world where there are bills to pay, I have a family to support and food to buy.  I also spend some of my otherwise free time doing science that I want to do but cannot get funded.  It is all about $$$, as you say, or in my case £££! Those £££ earned by paid work allow me to indulge my interest in taxonomy and do other work unpaid.

I don’t plan to respond any further to this thread as I have (funded) project deadlines to meet and that is using my time rather fully.  Thank you for your contribution and assistance in clearing up a further misconception about the call.  I’ll leave the call back in the safe hands of Thierry and Aurelie now.

Alastair

From:Stephen Thorpe [mailto:stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz] 
Sent: 24 July 2012 09:51
To: Outlook - A.Culham; 'TAXACOM'
Cc: p.schalk at eti.uva.nl
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

what you really mean is that you now realise that CoL is full of dirty data, and you are hoping to pay taxonomists to clean it for you ...

problem is that the dirty data is aften in the source databases (e.g. WTaxa, LepIndex), so if the taxonomists who created those databases couldn't manage to clean the data then, why will they be able to now? Maybe it is just all about the $$$...

From:Outlook - A.Culham <a.culham at reading.ac.uk>
To: 'TAXACOM' <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> 
Cc: p.schalk at eti.uva.nl 
Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 8:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] i4Life Call for Pilot Projects

Hello Taxacomers,

In the possibly vain hope of clearing up some misconceptions.... 

The current call from the i4Life project is primarily to fund GSDs to help them develop their content, and there is money on offer to do this.  Sadly for those outside Europe the funding is tied to the conditions of a grant from the European Union and this makes several potential contributors ineligible for this particular call for funding of content.  However, the rotating fund run by Species 2000 more generally is a system to distribute money, when it is available, to providers of GSDs on a competitive basis.  There is no intention to generate new GSDs in areas already adequately covered by Catalogue of Life simply because some current GSDs are not eligible for this round of funding.

The i4Life project aims to help facilitate at least some real (human) taxonomic work to help mop up the many orphan names that exist on the web.  Facilitation is through two routes: 1) funded work for those eligible for EU funds, up to the limit we have available to distribute within i4Life, via Species2000, and 2) provision of (sorted) name lists from some global biodiversity portals pro-bono to taxonomists who have other funding (including self-funding) that would like to have some help gathering names of relevance to their work from widely used data portals.

I am a taxonomist and I do think, for areas that I have specialism, that I could sort through a list of names and annotate them.  I also think I would sometimes add them to the database I have operated in my 'spare time'  for the past 6 years.

Gaining a coherent consensus on which areas have no current revision is part of the process of demonstrating the need for funding of revisionary taxonomy.  There is some excellent work going on, Sandy Knapp's (NSF funded) Solanaceae Source project is an example of such high quality modern revision http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/solanaceaesource/, Paul Wilkin's (NERC funded) e-monocots project http://e-monocot.org/ is another work in progress.  Apologies to the others that I have not mentioned.

There is precious little money available for taxonomic work and a huge amount of work that needs doing.  Catalogue of Life is one of the routes to publicise revisionary taxonomy and it is a route that can sometimes offer funded support.  It is not perfect, I have yet to see the perfect taxonomic system - and when I do I can take early retirement :-)

Alastair Culham
i4Life project leader (http://www.i4life.eu/)
Curator, University of Reading Herbarium (RNG)

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