[Taxacom] HHDB: hemihomonyms

[Pat LaFollette]

Dear Wolfgang,

At 06:49 AM 1/18/2010, Wolfgang Lorenz wrote:
>it's not 250 years too late, it's just the right moment to do things
>properly and "make nails with head". The ship has sailed well for 250 years,
>so why not renew some sails and make it fit for the electronic media?

I would suggest that the electronic media should renew some its sails 
to make it fit 250 years of systematic biology.

My point is that systematic biology should not, and need not, be 
subservient to the convenience of programmers, their indexing 
algorithms and database models. The biodiversity software designers 
should be serving the needs of systematic biology, not the other way 
around.  With effort and creativity, the indexing algorithms can be 
incrementally improved, elaborated and tailored to better accommodate 
the historical data. I suggested procedures that would improve the 
indexing of hemihomonyms.  It is neither necessary nor appropriate to 
ask the systematics community to undo 250 years of accumulated 
literature in response to a problem that can be readily managed by other means.

Pat


>Best wishes,
>Wolfgang
>------------------------------
>
>Wolfgang Lorenz, Tutzing, Germany
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Patrick I LaFollette
Research Associate in Malacology
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
pat at lafollette.com