Taxacom: A compromise solution (was Re: Single official lists of taxa (sensu Doug Yanega many proposals to this list))

[Peter Uetz]

Following up on Mark Scherz and others.
(Maybe these things have been said, and I missed them?)


Database of all names ever coined
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Yes, such lists exist, at least for some taxa. For instance, the Reptile Database has a list of all synonyms and their current names: https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reptile-database.org%2Fdata%2Freptile_synonyms_2023_04.xlsx&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Cf2e25fb262df44254e1d08db7e5ecb02%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638242718266616034%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=twRiivjGbKtror10jx9MJWvmXKl7vh1%2F1w7PD6KEa24%3D&reserved=0
This list is also made available to the Catalogue of Life, although I am not exactly sure how they process it.

Gender and spelling
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With the aforementioned list, all possible gender variants can be generated automatically,
e.g. for all Latin names, such as “fasciata”, by systematically producing permutations of all endings (fasciatum, fasciatus etc.).
Problem solved (at least as findability of names is concerned).

Etymologies
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Whether you love terminology and etymology or not:
This is why we have databases, where you can look up such stuff.
Latin is getting out of fashion anyway, with all the decolonialization being en vogue.
Get used to names such as Cyrtopodion vindhya, where Classics doesn’t help you at all.
(but knowing that it’s the name of a hill in Gujarat does :)

Permanent identifiers
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This is a much bigger problem, as taxonomic concepts change, even if names or identifiers do not.
Hence, a permanent identifier in taxonomy isn’t really permanent.
Maybe it could be, if it had a version number, so that each version corresponded to a particular definition in time.
It’s ironic, given that GenBank has version numbers for sequences, but NCBI Taxonomy does NOT.


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Peter Uetz
Center for Biological Data Science
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284
USA

Reptile Database (https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reptile-database.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Cf2e25fb262df44254e1d08db7e5ecb02%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638242718266616034%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Ak%2FiCfHlxsVflDu9iWs9DPCV729gUXttkvEwrDIUQ6Q%3D&reserved=0)
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fuetz.info%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Cf2e25fb262df44254e1d08db7e5ecb02%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638242718266616034%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Xi3RAatk%2FkbkrZdoi00qk3Z1f%2Fqg%2BV0KlIHKLpTWWFI%3D&reserved=0