[Taxacom] FW: Scientific Names

[Mary Barkworth]

And he did respond.

From: zaphrauk at gmail.com [mailto:zaphrauk at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Owain Lewis
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 11:29 AM
To: rjensen at saintmarys.edu
Cc: dyanega at ucr.edu; Mary Barkworth; nadia.talent at utoronto.ca
Subject: Scientific Names

Hi All,

Thank you for taking the time to get in touch. Apologies for not replying to each email individually. I just wanted to address some of the points you raised.

The website itself was just a side-project started a few years ago (I can't even remember why to be honest other than I had the domain name sitting spare). I noticed there wasn't a reliable online database for scientific names at the time and so created the site to fill that need. I don't have any knowledge of the subject matter and so the information was mostly pulled together from various sources. I guess I was trying to pull all the information I found into one central location. The project seemed interesting to me at the time. Clearly it was overambitious.

I no longer have any real need for the site and haven't touched it for a long time now. I am more than happy to take the site down if you feel the information is misleading and unhelpful. There is no financial benefit to me at all. The site was built on a whim over the course of a weekend as an exercise more than anything else.

In an ideal world I'd love to see the site developed by someone with the correct information as I feel it could be a really valuable resource if done correctly. If we were to rebuild the site now I'd suggest it would need an API where scientific communities could easily access the information for research.

Clearly I naively underestimated the scope of the task (collecting all this information would require a significant amount of effort by more than one person).

There are two options, I'll either take the site down completely or remove all the incorrect information.

To be honest I have very little time available at the moment (I work full time as a software developer and have a busy business) and so I'll do my best to address this when I get some spare time.

Apologies again for the inaccurate information and thanks for taking the time to share your concerns. I had no idea it was the source of such debate.

Kind regards

Owain



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Owain Lewis

Freelance Clojure and Ruby developer

Email: owain at owainlewis.com<mailto:owain at owainlewis.com>
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