This page has been published but is subject to revision.

Examples of publishing Darwin Core synonymy

This example illustrates the GNA output format for modelling synonymy. It utilises a series of zoological and botanical examples and styles published at http://www.peabody.yale.edu/other/PROTEM/TAXSIG/taxonomy_synonyms_examples.pdf

View the example below at Google Docs

<wiki:gadget url="http://gbif-ecat.googlecode.com/svn/gadgets/synonyms.xml" width="1200" height="600" />

Comments

This series of examples illustrate both botanical and zoological examples and formatting conventions. Each example references a single taxon. That taxon is described by a series of bibliographic references that are distinguished as primary, secondary or synonym. The primary reference represents the first use of the specific name combination. We interpret secondary references as subsequent references using the name reviewed by the author that conform to the defined concept. We interpret synonym reference as the original source of the taxonomic assertion that the cited taxon is a synonym of the accepted name.

We considered two ways to represent these data. One approach is to list each atomic taxon reference as a single row. Thus, for the Orcinus orca example, there would be 6 rows representing Orcinus orca (Linnaeus, 1758). The first would hold the primary reference in namePublishedIn. The remaining 5 rows would be duplicates with secondary publications in nameAccordingTo.

There are problems with this approach. First, either we have to repeat certain properties like taxonomicStatus or decide to complete only the primary reference and leave the others blank. Is the taxonomic status "valid" (zoological sense) for all of them or just the primary reference?

We ended up having only the primary reference in the core table and using a reference extension for the secondary publications. This leaves us with parsed secondary references and unparsed primary references but it's better normalised.