Jacek Konieczny wrote:
On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 05:42:25PM +0100, Jack Stringer wrote:
> My rule of thumb would of be label it in english rather that
local name.
> But that's because I am english. Using latin would put some
people off
> from tagging Zoos.
But precise latin specie name is a universal identifier (rather than
a „human readable” name), which can be easily translated to local
names
by automated means. For some species, I guess, there will be no
English
name, but there may be a local name. And Latin name will always be
defined.
As I'm presently working on a semantic application which includes bird
catalogs, I can say that things aren't so easy (but aren't much harder).
While the idea of using the latin name (a.k.a. binomial name) is a good
idea (much better than localized names, that often are ambiguous), there
isn't a "universal" catalog of names (my experience is limited to birds,
but I expect my point is valid for other animals too). Instead there is
a number of different taxonomies around, even though some are more
commonly used than others (e.g. Clements for birds); probably the most
complex point is that names don't stay the same in time, as taxonomies
are constantly evolved and maintained; sometimes a single species name
changes, sometimes the genus name changes, sometimes two different
species are grouped into a single one, sometimes what is considered a
single species with "variants" is split in multiple species.
Thus, a good way to represent a species name would be a triple:
"taxonomy name", "taxonomy year", "binomial name". Eg.
"Clements", "2008", "Larus canus"
would represent the "Mew gull" (not sure it's called "Common gull"
throughout the whole world, BTW). This should be enough, and would make
possible to specialized applications (such as mine) to find the semantic
equivalence with other taxonomies, localized names and so on.
While this might sound picky, in the Semantic Web perspective it is
important to be picky.
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/blog
[email protected] - mobile: +39 348.150.6941
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