[Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

[Stephen Thorpe]

label data is a huge can of worms for all sorts of reasons! After having thought the issue through at some length, I have come to the probably rather unpopular conclusion that it is a bad idea to think that the totality of label data for any given taxon is a useful thing to have! It is somewhat analogous to the example of using WoRMS as a source for that squat lobster article on WP ... given the way the WoRMS page was at the time, it was best to just not mention it at all! There is a certain irony that it is common nowadays for scientists to spend money going on collecting tours to get fresh material of taxa for use in DNA analysis. Actually, it would be better to go on a collecting tour to gather reliable distributional information for the taxon! Any distribution map based on the uncritical acceptance of label data is likely to be problematic, unles the map is so coarse that points cover a significant proportion of the planet! Even worse is displaying a
 distribution map of a tiny subsample of available label data! If you want to know the geographical distribution of a taxon, you gotta go out and measure it ... carefully!
?
Stephen


________________________________
From: David Campbell <pleuronaia at gmail.com>
To: TAXACOM at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2012 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

> Unfortunately, original data labels are often extremely misleading,
> especially regarding distributional information. After georeferencing
> over 200,000 insect specimens from multiple institutions, the figures
> work out to over 20% of all original labels have significant
> omissions or ambiguities (the latter category being primarily things
> like abbreviations, uncertain reference points, uncertain date
> formats, or handwriting problems), and some 5% of all original labels
> have genuine errors of one sort or another (mostly typographical
> errors). I doubt such problems are unique to insect labels.

I can confirm that mollusk labels have similar issues with similarly
high frequency, though I have not tallied percentages. In fact,
insects may have better than average quality of average data because
fewer specimens survive from the "I picked these up somewhere when my
ship sailed around the world" era.? Having a misidentified specimen
with good locality data is far more useful than a correctly identified
specimen with bad locality data, as the identification can be fixed
from the specimen.? Someone knowledgeable about the taxon or locality
may be able to recognize that a record is supect, even without
examining the specimen.? But all data in a database needs competent
checking to be reliable.? And many larger collections will include
items from various sources, of varying reliability for their
localities and identifications.

The problem is compounded when online databases grab information from
varied sources without careful verification or good harmonization
protocols.? In particular, homonyms can lead to perfectly good
information from one database being presented wrongly in another one,
which claims that corrections should be referred back to the first
database.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
Collections Assistant
The Paleontological Research Institution
1259 Trumansburg Road
Ithaca NY 14850

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