You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman: ”What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966) published in The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6 (1969)
It is customary for scientists to cite the author of a scientific name whenever that name is used. Indeed it is considered grossly amateurish in some circles to omit such details. This causes problems because, although there are standards for abbreviation of author names (notably Brummitt in botany), these are not always followed and often embellished. This means that the entire string of name characters is never guaranteed to be unique. To a machine every variation of authority string would results in a new combination of characters and implies the existence of a new taxon
What if we just stopped using author strings (other than in monographs) and ignore them when other people use them? Continue reading »
Tremendous energy is required to re-animate the dead.
At last month’s TDWG2009 conference I was on a panel for a brief discussion at the end of a session. There were around 200 people in the audience and handful of us up front as lambs for the slaughter.
One of the questions from the floor concerned the automation of the taxonomic process. I don’t recall the precise question but it triggered one of my (probably boring) canned responses.
I pointed out that the usual practice in software engineering, when asked to automate a system, is to produce a Domain Model based on an analysis of some Use Cases that then leads on to some Object Model or implementation model that is actually created in software. The assumption behind this is that whatever was being done was good but needs to be done faster – with computers!
In biodiversity informatics, and particularly in biological taxonomy, this is not such a good idea. Current working practice was developed in the light of the prevailing technology of the time. If computers and the internet had been available from the start things would probably have been done differently. The worst thing we can do now is automate a paper based system. Continue reading »
Keeping up with the nearly-year-old tradition of putting all outputs on my blog here are the latest two reports I have submitted as part of the PESI.
- Report on authoritative taxonomic standards from multiple sources suitable for deployment within European Research Area – resubmission with some clarifications. (PDF = PESI_D4.1_Standards_Report_v2.1.pdf )
- Report on Procedures and Mechanisms for the Functioning of Nomenclators within the e-Infrastructure. (PDF = PESI_D4.2_Nomenclators_Role_Report_v1.1 )
Read and enjoy!
I have been wrestling for some time with how to handle taxonomic hierarchies when combining multiple classifications. This is partly motivated by a pressure to produce consensus hierarchies for navigation (a task that I think is probably not worth doing but which is beyond the scope of this post) and partly from a need to carry out inference over multiple classifications using OWL (something that I think is an important research topic if we are to overcome the ‘taxonomic impediment’).
Take the simplest scenario where we have classification C1 that contains family Z with two genera X and Y that contain a total of three species Xa, Xb and Yc. Now let there be another classification C2 that is identical but for the species Xb being moved to the genus Y as Yb. Continue reading »