[Taxacom] PDF request

[Stephen Thorpe]

Quoting Dave Roberts:
'So we want to encourage use of use wikispecies, wikipedia, EoL, Scratchpads, 
GBIF and any of the other projects that are making taxonomic products 
accessible.  We particularly want to see them dynamically integrated into other 
products like ecology, climate change, land-use, epidemiology and so on, for 
whom taxonomy is not a goal in itself'

All well and good, though a potential problem (touched on before in Taxacom 
discussion) is that no two of these projects seem to agree on details (or so it 
seems), so how are the end users going to know who to believe? Some projects 
proactively tout themselves as the one true authoritative source, but you don't 
have to look very hard to find significant problems ...

"too many cooks spoil the broth"  - Too many persons involved in managing an 
activity can ruin it, as in Without a conductor, every player had an idea for 
how the music should go—too many cooks spoil the broth. This expression alludes 
to each of many cooks adding something to a soup, which finally tastes awful. It 
was already considered a proverb in 1575 (by George Gascoigne in The Life of P. 
Care).




________________________________
From: Paul Kirk <p.kirk at cabi.org>
To: Dave Roberts <workpackage6 at googlemail.com>; taxacom taxacom 
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Mon, 23 August, 2010 8:27:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] PDF request

Dave,

In your last paragraph, I think you are preaching from the same sermon
that Berners Lee is using as the basis of his TED talk
(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html
) - some of the 'acronyms' are moving in this direction but some of the
other projects are not.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Dave Roberts
Sent: 23 August 2010 09:19
To: taxacom taxacom
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] PDF request

Dear Lisong,

unfortunately the British Ecological Society (BES) don't make their
bulletin available electronically.  The text of the article is available
at

http://www.e-taxonomy.eu/node/648

to which Stephen referred.  The HTML was made from the same file as
published, so please use the BES citation if you wish to quote it.

The quote to which Stephen refers is simply an observation on the
frequency of descriptive taxonomists either presenting or defending  
the plethora of initiatives in the field of biodiversity informatics.  
Here we draw a distinction with bioinformatics, dominated by molecular
biologists, precisely because biodiversity informatics cares about
morphology and more particularly about nomenclature.

The article was published in the Bulletin of the British Ecological
Society and was basically an appeal that sprang from a coffee-time
conversation at eBiosphere with an ecologist lamenting the rather low
representation of ecologists and the other essential disciplines that
Fabian mentions in his response.  EDIT is very keen to see taxonomy
integrated into other activities and not to see it become a cul-de-sac
discipline.  Our view is that we need to mobilise the data that
taxonomists use and, wherever possible, integrate those resources into
forms that other disciplines need. Taxonomic output is often of limited
use outside taxonomy itself (= cul-de-sac).

So we want to encourage use of use wikispecies, wikipedia, EoL,
Scratchpads, GBIF and any of the other projects that are making
taxonomic products accessible.  We particularly want to see them
dynamically integrated into other products like ecology, climate change,
land-use, epidemiology and so on, for whom taxonomy is not a goal in
itself.

Cheers,  Dave
--
On 23 Aug 2010, at 04:06, Lisong Wang wrote:

> Hi, I am looking for a PDF paper, Tillier S. (2009) Biodiversity 
> Informatics. What's in it for us? Bulletin of the British Ecological 
> Society 2009 40(3): 39-42.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Lisong_______________________________________________
>
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of 
> these methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/ 
> pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here

-- 
Dr D.McL. Roberts,        Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 5086
European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy Project, Coordinator
WorkPackage 6 (Unifying Revisionary Taxonomy), Dept. Zoology, The
Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road,
London        SW7 5BD
Great Britain            Email: dmr at nomencurator dot org
Web page:  http://scratchpads.eu
Web page:  http://www.editwebrevisions.info/
--
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try and give it to
them.  By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." [Steve
Jobs, quoted in The Guardian, Technology Section, 25 June 09].
--






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