LinneanCoreUrgency

GregorHagedorn - Tue Oct 26 2004 - Version 1.1
Parent topic: LinneanCore
From email by Chris Lyal, 24 Oct. 2004

"... a plea for some speed in our work. GBIF is in urgent need of a names standard. It is already a severe difficulty for ECAT not having one in place, and there are teams in a number of institutions round the world compiling datasets to supply to GBIF, on GBIF funds, that are waiting for the standard before making their work accessible to us. Donald is in a better position to give us a timescale than I am, and I would welcome a date from him by which we should have something agreed. However, I would like to see agreement within a very few months, or preferably weeks, so that we can get this implemented. I do not see this, any more, as a long-term project - it has been that, and we are already past the time when we needed it.

I thought that the possibility shown by Donald in the meeting of LinneanCore and TCS being employed as discrete layers was very valuable, and showed us ther way in which we can progress. In this way GBIF will be able to use the strengths of both schemas, but will not be tied to the completion of TCS before being able to employ the LinneanCore. I don't want to get into a re-hash here of the discussion of the appropriateness of treating names as concepts - we can do that on the WIKI when we get it, and if once we have tested it further with real cases we are all happy with it, then there will, I hope, be no problem of including the developed LinneanCore within the TCS. However, given the need for the developed LinneanCore a.s.a.p., I would like to really focus on that as the priority of the group.

A final point before I have to stop (and my apologies for a hurried message). Although some of the datasets that will be accessed through the schema are nomenclators, we will need to mediate more complex catalogues, including all of the nomenclatural detail found within Species 2000 and ITIS (and more!)."