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#99: Taxon Names and Identifiers -----------------------------+---------------------------------------------- Reporter: lowry | Owner: [email protected] Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: high | Milestone: Component: cf-conventions | Version: Resolution: | Keywords: -----------------------------+---------------------------------------------- Comment (by graybeal): Thank you for the clarification. I think this is a critical detail worth additional attention. The premise of semantic interoperability, based on extensive real-world experience, is that interoperability can not be achieved through constraining everyone to use one vocabulary (or two). There are any number of good reasons that the chosen vocabulary(ies) may not be sufficient. With semantics, this weakness is easily overcome by creating relations between vocabularies. In some cases those relations are precise and homomorphic; in other cases they are descriptive instead, but still powerful, and extensible with time. So if you give me *one* taxonomic ID, I don't need a second one, or a name, or a verification of their relationship; I will have, external to CF, the tools and relations that tell me how those are related. (WORMS is a 'best practices' case of this; you can look up a matching entry in ITIS directly from the WORMS entry.) Trying to replicate this functionality makes CF more complex, at no value to CF, because the linked open data and semantic communities will take care of it much more robustly, and much less expensively for everyone. Roy has said these are the two vocabularies, yes, and I am sure he knows more about them than I do. But when I asked a practicing biologist about ITIS, this was the answer I got: "Species 2000 was an umbrella group that combined ITIS and other sources. SP2000 provides LSIDs (including for ITIS names)." When I looked at Species 2000, it indicated records are harvested from 3 ITIS databases, a large number of WORMS databases, and about 100 others. From this I conclude that ITIS and WORMS are indeed very valuable and credible, and there are many other sources of taxonomic data that are valuable and credible. This illustrates a clear choice. We can attempt to collect and summarize the combined wisdom of the biological-technical community to keep abreast over time about which of these taxonomic databases are necessary and sufficient for CF. Or we can defer that judgment to the ongoing efforts in the community, which seem likely to continue to be ongoing. Certainly if we want to encourage interoperability, recommending the most prominent (WORMS, ITIS, SP2000, ?) as a good source of taxa and their unique identifiers seems sensible. -- Ticket URL: <https://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/99#comment:4> CF Metadata <http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/> CF Metadata This message came from the CF Trac system. To unsubscribe, without unsubscribing to the regular cf-metadata list, send a message to "[email protected]" with "unsubscribe cf-metadata" in the body of your message.
