This thread seems to have spiralled off into the murky waters of taxonomic
opinion, where no sane individual would want to go ;)

Dragging it back a bit, my list of five services I think would be useful were:

1. Is this a name? 2. Is this the correct way to write it? 3. Is this name currently in use? 4. What other names are related to this name (e.g., synonyms, lexical variants)? 5. Where was this name published? Can I see that publication?

I still think most of this is pretty straightforward to do. Number 3 could
perhaps be best phrased as "what name should I use?." As much as we might
dislike the question (there will often be multiple possible names, and some
argument about which to use), I suspect many uses don't care about these minor
details, they want a name to use for their purposes. As Robert Scoble has argued
in the context of buying a mobile phone, people want to make a choice that
avoids making them look stupid http://scobleizer.com/2011/12/26/phone7/

In the case of taxonomic names, I'm guessing people would like to use a name
that most of their readers are likely to recognise, and that search engines will
find. If I'm compiling a list of animals eaten by penguins I don't want the full
taxonomic history, nor do I want ambiguity, just give me a name!

There also seems to be an undercurrent of "this taxonomy stuff is really hard,
we can't automate this stuff because taxonomists have special knowledge, etc.".
There will always be hard cases that need expertise, but I suspect a lot of the
information users need can be computed. For example, Huber and Klump have done
some interesting work on using algorithms inspired by Google's PageRank to
analyse taxonomic synonomies (see
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2008.02.016 , free PDF here
http://edoc.gfz-potsdam.de/gfz/get/13007/0/d8b09c133462792c99eb6a163a6c5601/13007.pdf
).

So, I'd like to see less special pleading that taxonomy is hard, that taxonomic
knowledge is special, and more focus on what users want (or need), and how we
can create the tools they need.

Regards

Rod

--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.p...@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodp...@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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