tdwg/dwc-qa

Developer advice - what term to use for a uninomial?

kehh opened this issue · 0 comments

kehh commented

Hi,
I know DwC is a data exchange format but I'm trying to implement a name management in a system and wanted to try to use the correct term for a property.

The system stores parent names as adjacency lists (using a parent_id field) and also has a taxonRank property for the current rank of the name.

The property I'm looking to add is a uninomial'and that would be used to calculate the scientificName by using the current taxonRank and parent names.

The TDWG ontology has:

  • nameComplete (scientificName without any authority)
  • uninomial (A single name without authority down to the level of genus)

There's also the proposed dwc term genericName which might fill this role

I'm imagining the user enters a reference to the parent name, the taxon rank and this uninomial and from there you can calculate what all of the other ranks fields contain.

So:

genus specificEpithet infraspecificEpithet scientificNameAuthorship
Macropus Shaw, 1790
Macropus fulginosus (Desmarest, 1817)
Macropus fulginosus melanops Gould, 1842

would be captured as:

parent_id id uninomial taxonRank scientificNameAuthorship
1 Macropus genus Shaw, 1790
1 2 fulginosus species (Desmarest, 1817)
2 3 melanops subspecies Gould, 1842

I'm aware this gets complicated with subgenera and multiple infraspecific ranks below species.

So my question is 'What should I call this field for minimal user confusion" (It's handy to point to / reuse the DwC definitions / labels for fields to explain how they are used)