[Taxacom] Species Cite: linking scientific names to publications and taxonomists

[Roderic Page]

Hi John,

This would be a nice thing to have, and as we link things together we may be able to get closer to being able to do this.

There have been various attempts in the past. Dave Remsen had a tool that subscribed to journal RSS feeds (basically a news reader) and could give you lists of recent papers for a taxonomic group. My old iSpecies tried to grab data from various sources to summarise what we knew about a taxon. There are others.

I’ve often found Wikipedia to be useful, but that is highly dependent on someone with the time and energy to maintain that page. But it’s striking how often a single sentence will be so much more informative than a database.

I suspect that the way forward will be to “automagically” write summaries based on a database like Wikidata. In other words, take a set of facts about a taxon (e.g., how many species, when the most recent was found, something on ecology, etc.) and convert that to natural language, complete with references. I think the Encyclopedia of Life attempted something like this.

My sense is that what you ask for is in principle doable, if probably a bit harder than it sounds, but at the same time is the sort of thing that biodiversity informatics should be capable of doing (i.e., making things that people actually find useful, rather than thing we can do because, well, we can).

Regards,

Rod



On 2 Aug 2021, at 16:09, John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com<mailto:calabar.john at gmail.com>> wrote:

This current discussion reminds me to ask what is out there that is free and comprehensive (as much as one might hope for) in terms of recording new taxonomic publications for a particular group (terrestrial family in my case) that is comparable to Zoo Record or Biosis (which I don't have access to), and perhaps even include publications on other aspects of particular taxa (e.g. biology, systematics). Under my circumstances I am currently left to random Web searches that are hit or miss.

John Grehan

On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 7:15 AM Quentin Groom via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:
I imagine marine people are very happy with WoRMS, it is a very rich
source, but it exists in its own marine bubble with only implicit links
out. How wonderful it would be if all the people it mentions were
disambiguated (authors, authorities, editors), because then it could
really take a strong place in the biodiversity informatics landscape, not
just the marine section of it.
Quentin





On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 at 11:54, Roderic Page via Taxacom <
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:

> Hi Lena,
>
> WoRMS is great, and is something that I plan to add to Species-Cite in the
> future.
>
> From my perspective the thing WoRMS lacks is links to external identifiers
> for the literature (e.g., DOIs, etc.). This means that the literature is
> essentially in a database-specific silo 9this is true of most taxonomic
> databases). Now, for WoRMS users that may be just fine, the database meets
> their needs, the names and citations they are after are there.
>
> I’d like things to be less siloed such that, for example, I can go from a
> name in WoRMS to an external identifier for the literature,  to the
> taxonomists who did the work, and the full text for the paper. And I’d like
> to do that all in one place.
>
> I think for anyone aggregating data the challenge is to deliver value
> above and beyond what individual databases can do, otherwise there is
> little point in aggregating the data in the first place. So I guess the
> challenge would be to see if aggregating data from WoRMS can create
> something that adds value on top of what WoRMS itself offers. And of
> course, any such value would be available to WoRMS to incorporate if the
> WoRMS editors felt it added something to their database.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rod
>
>
> On 2 Aug 2021, at 10:37, Elena Kupriyanova
> <Elena.Kupriyanova at Australian.Museum<mailto:Elena.Kupriyanova at Australian.Museum><mailto:
> Elena.Kupriyanova at Australian.Museum<mailto:Elena.Kupriyanova at Australian.Museum>>> wrote:
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I am not talking about it for a simple reason -  I did not want to mention
> that for marine species we already have WoRMS (World Register of Marine
> Species) http://www.marinespecies.org/index.php
> I happen to be one of hundreds of taxonomical editors for this database
> Sorry...
> Best,
> Lena
>
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