[Taxacom] 2018 Edition of Catalogue of Life released

[Tony Rees]

Hi John,

Catalogue of Life is an aggregator (or perhaps a better term is consortium
of contributing data partners) and sources its family-level content and
below from contributing databases, so decisions as to (e.g.) splits,
mergers and present taxonomic assignments of genera and species come from
those sources, not CoL central (although of course CoL has some control
over individual source selection, where alternatives exist). In the case of
Hepialidae, from the relevant CoL display page I see that the data supplier
is LepIndex, 2012 version (
http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2018/details/database/id/18),
so that is where that treatment originates. So if you have issues with it,
you need to take it up there, I would suggest, or if you feel that LepIndex
is not the best resource for that taxonomic sector, then that is something
you can advise to CoL. That's how the system works, to the best of my
knowledge.

In my case with the IRMNG data, "publishing" subsets of it through CoL lays
the content open to additional scrutiny, which is both good and bad: good
because it may entice people to investigate additional associated
information available in the data source but not included in the data dump
supplied to CoL, and bad in that errors or outdated treatments in the IRMNG
content are more likely to be visible. However I actually see the last
aspect as a good thing in that the more eyes scrutinize the content, the
more readily errors etc. can be spotted and fixed, hopefully in time for
feeding through to subsequent CoL releases. That's my philosophy at least -
resources permitting of course.

Regards - Tony

Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees

On 29 May 2018 at 12:14, John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is a nice illustration of the mystical nature of taxonomy and
> phylogeny. With respect to my group of interest, CoL has chosen to accept a
> recent proposal to subsume several former families under another family
> (Hepialidae) even though there is no objective rationale to do so (just
> preference expressed by authors of one phylogenetic paper).
>
> John Grehan
>
> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 8:52 PM, Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Taxacomers,
>>
>> As a (new) CoL contributor, I am just letting you know that the 2018
>> Edition of the Catalogue of Life has just been released at
>> http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col . Content that is new for this release
>> (including from the IRMNG database, for which I am largely responsible at
>> present) is listed here: http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/info/special
>>
>> The inclusion of IRMNG data down to genus (not species at this time)
>> allows
>> CoL to fill a range of gaps in Protozoa and Chromista for which there are
>> currently no other contributing Global Species Databases (GSDs), and may
>> be
>> superseded in the future as other sources become available for these
>> sectors. Meanwhile I am happy to field any questions regarding the
>> classifications used for Protozoa and Chromista in IRMNG at this time,
>> which is intended eventually to follow that of Ruggiero et al. (2015) and
>> successors, although not yet completely upgraded to follow that treatment.
>>
>> Regards to all - Tony
>>
>> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
>> https://about.me/TonyRees
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>>
>
>