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[Taxacom] biodiversity informatics (was: PDF request)

Dave Roberts workpackage6 at googlemail.com
Tue Aug 24 03:51:03 CDT 2010 

Dear Stephen,

one doesn't have to cast ones mind back very far to recall the  
essentially anarchic situation when all this was published on paper.   
Most outside the taxonomic field were impressed by size and just used  
the most comprehensive treatment around, although all the ones I use  
still contain a number of significant errors.  I suspect, but can't  
demonstrate, that these days there are more of us, we're working in  
bigger teams and are consequently a little less anarchic.

Personally I do not think that there is every going to be "one true  
authoritative source".  Its a holy grail.  Its virtue lies in the  
search not in the finding.

I also offer the comparison of a musical night in the pub.  Sometimes  
the participants click and you get good performance satisfying all  
present (a good craic).  At other times, its discordant or prone to  
melancholy.  There is never a conductor.  If you're there its not hard  
to tell the difference, although probably impossible to define exactly  
why one night was good and another was not.

At a simple, practical level the first step is make the data  
accessible so that those that know can take it to the second step by  
filtering and assembling it efficiently into reviews and compendia.  I  
do think that this is achievable in little steps each one of which  
benefits the contributor.  For the foreseeable future it is a case of  
caveat emptor: readers should make active value judgement and not be  
passive consumers.

Cheers,  Dave
--
On 23 Aug 2010, at 23:19, Stephen Thorpe wrote:

> 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_______________________________________________
>>
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>
> -- 
> 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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-- 
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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