[Taxacom] taxonomic names databases

[Roderic Page]

Arguably the goal of lists that include distribution is what GBIF http://www.gbif.org is doing. By combining taxonomic names (“checklists”) and collection data from natural history collections (“occurrences”) it generates species distributions.
Regards

Rod

On 27 Aug 2016, at 15:50, Dilrukshan Wijesinghe <dpwijesinghe at yahoo.com<mailto:dpwijesinghe at yahoo.com>> wrote:

The World Spider Catalog is excellent for all of the things mentioned. One aspect that is less than ideal even in many curated lists of species is the inability to search with geographic names e.g. countries. Of course curated lists are put together by taxonomists for taxonomists and the focus is on taxa rather than areas but the most important end user IMHO is the local naturalist who wants to generate an authoritative list of species for the area he/she is interested in. There are some curated lists that go beyond type localities and incorporate distribution information for each species based on the literature covered but even in these cases searching by geographic terms is usually not possible (e.g. WSC). (Ironically, when the WSC existed as many html files it was possible to do a simple text search on each file!)

I realize this is only tangentially relevant to the current thread and I do appreciate the huge effort required to include searchable geographic distribution information for each species. But I do think that should be the ultimate goal for all curated lists of species.

Priyantha

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 27, 2016, at 9:43 AM, Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com<mailto:tonyrees49 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello Mary, all,

The World Spider Catalog (to which Angelo refers) is an excellent example
of doing things well, so far as I can see. First, there is a huge effort to
be comprehensive and a long history of continued releases and improvements,
each citable as needed (see http://www.wsc.nmbe.ch/archive/). Second, the
data, originally as flat files, have been transferred into a completely
reprocessed relational database from 2014 onwards, as well as a change of
agency for intended assured persistence, according to the account given at
http://www.wsc.nmbe.ch/introduction. Third, all the taxonomic names data
(with a slight version lag) are added to, and made available for download
via, the Catalogue of Life, see
http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/details/database/id/29 ; and last, but
certainly not least, an email address is given for notification of errors
and omissions. Presumably the same can be made for many other, if not quite
all, Cat. of Life contributors for which we should be very grateful in the
main; speaking from minor past interactions the CoL is always interested in
improving data quality and does strive to replace known sources of lower
quality with higher quality equivalents as and when possible (which is the
principal means at its disposal)

Regards - Tony (no present affiliation with either World Spider Catalog or
Cat. of Life)

Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees

On 27 August 2016 at 22:59, Mary Barkworth <Mary.Barkworth at usu.edu> wrote:

A DOWNLOADABLE list of accepted names would be superb (synonyms and their
accepted name would a lovely addition). Perhaps a "Cc-by" with date for
attribution. That would help those of us trying to build websites for
information about the biodiversity of a region.  Yes, I realize, the
derivative product will not then be automatically updated - but the
derivative product (in my case a web site of specimens and observations)
would provide more and more information going forwards and people in the
region who like a particular group of organisms could be encouraged to
check for changes that need to be made.  As it is, a web site such as that
for spiders (animals for which I do not personally care) is a huge
frustration. Thank you for it - but please, a little more.  I mention
spiders but it applies to all curated nomenclatural databases.  For my
purposes, the fact that it is curated means I can trust it - and send users
to it for primary literature.

Mary
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Roderic Page
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