[Taxacom] Automatic species identification: DNA only descriptions

[Sergio Vargas]

Hi,

> Whilst at the BMNH I remember at least 2 sepparate projects to automate species identification. Both used morphology. The dream to automate identification is pervasive and not the domain of one or another group. Whilst it might be entertaining to identify organisms it is a practical matter of workload management. "Never have so many asked so few to identify so much"

The current hype on automatic species identification circles around
two myths: that it should be easier to build an automatic species
identification system if DNA is used for the task, and that this
identifier will be error-free.

Among the many obvious problems:

1. DNA makes thing easier sometimes and much more complicated some other times.

2. Any identifier (even a human one) will be error prone.

3. The decision on which method should be used for the assignment and
how to deal with sensitivity to method choice is... a big issue.

The failure of most automatic identification systems seems to be that
many people is hoping to have some kind of taxonomist droid capable of
classifying whatever comes across... this hope is naive at best.
Automatic classification is not an easy task. There are plenty of
problems in automatic classification (whether supervised or
unsupervised) that we biologists seem to ignore, I guess this is the
root of over-optimism regarding automatic taxonomic classification.

sergio

-- 
Sergio Vargas R., M.Sc.
Molecular Geo- and Palaeobiology Lab.
Dept. of Geo- & Environmental Sciences, Palaeontology and Geobiology
LMU München
Richard-Wagner Str. 10
80333 Munich, Germany
tel. +49 89 2180 17929
s.vargas at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
sergio.vargasr at ecci.ucr.ac.cr