[Taxacom] taxonomic names databases

[Tony Rees]

Hi John,

Zoological Record (plus the publicly accessible ION "names" section
thereof) is a commercial entity owned by Thomson Reuters who maintain their
own system as a commercial operation aand currently do not systematically
share their content with other names-gathering initiatives (Rich will
correct me here if I am wrong), although they have in the past provided
some data dumps to GBIF and uBio (but not for a number of years). Rod Page
has been downloading ION data for upload into his own BioNames system
(apparently without TR objection) which he does share, but so far as I am
aware has not made a new bulk file of the latter since April 2015 (which is
the last copy I used to update genus names for IRMNG; I did not do the
species at that time since the genera alone were a large enough task).

I think there plans some years ago about Zoo. Record content
feeding/seeding ZooBank and/or the Global Names initiative on a regular
basis but these did not eventuate. We would have to ask Rich as to whether
anything is capable of being revived in that space since they certainly do
most of the "heavy lifting" of tracking new names in zoology (although as I
said earlier, a lot of the older content is quite high noise:signal and
requires caution before use), however one might understand them wanting
some recompense before releasing everything for public use/re-use for
free...

So, while potentially other databases can find names in ION/Zoo. Record the
same as a human user, there is presently no simple way to do this on a
regular basis (i.e. mostly automated data export-import), at least without
a lot of additional manual intervention.

Regards - Tony