Hi Rob,
At the risk of opening the whole taxon/name/concept can of worms, I’d see this a little differently.
For me a taxon name is a name + the original publication, rather than simply a text string. A taxon is different again, being essentially a statement about a collection of things that belong to the same taxon, and a statement of what to call them.
Taxon databases (e.g., GBIF) tend use strings for names, when it would be more elegant to use identifiers for names + publications. We could go some way towards cleaning the mess we’ve accumulated if we adopted (and reused) identifiers for these things.
For a start, name strings that don’t map to identifiers in nomenclators would immediately be under suspicion as being potentially erroneous. it also links names to evidence, which is something we’re spectacularly bad at doing at the moment.
For example, "Pristimantis vilcabambae” is a text string which isn’t terribly useful. But if we combine that with details on where and when it was published we get something a bit more useful:
Should this "name string + publication” get a DOI? Sure. Then I’d want GBIF (and other taxon databases) to link to this name on their taxon pages. In other words,
http://www.gbif.org/species/2425396 should
have an identifier for the taxon name, instead of simply using a text string.
I’m beginning to sound like Rich Pyle, and he and I would a lost certainly model these things differently, but name strings <> taxon names <> taxa
Regards
Rod
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Markus --- I think the answer to the question: "Would a taxon DOI be a valuable feature for you?" really depends on some of the details. With a taxon name, you are putting a DOI
on a string and one that has been dissociated from its source(s). I would think more valuable would be a DOI linked to the checklist that contained the name, and maybe a passthrough (a la suffix passthroughs in the EZID system) to the individual name. That
way I can resolve that taxon name to the source from whence it came.
Best, Rob
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