Taxonomy fields - Darwin Core Hour Input Form 2/16/2017 16:22:16

[iDigBioBot]

A user submitted this information via the Darwin Core Hour webform:
Timestamp: 2/16/2017 16:22:16
Please provide a topic of interest: Best practices for handling the taxonomy fields when meshing paleo- and neontological data creates weirdnesses due to the Linnaean ranking system. How do we optimize searchability without making things overly complicated or scrapping ranks entirely (since that would be a nightmare)?
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Your name: JessMC@ucr.edu
Your email: JessMC@ucr.edu
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[tucotuco]

Hi Jess, Darwin Core supports a small subset of the Linnaean ranks - those that the community has settled on (so far) as essential. One way to deal with the problems of incomplete mapping (ranks missing in Darwin Core) and clades that do not correspond nicely with ranks is to capture the classification of interest in the Darwin Core field higherClassification (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#higherClassification). Since the recommendation is for the field to contain the list of names (separated by ' | '), one can propagate all of them without loss (and/but) without reference to rank. Thus, one could capture the entire Paleobiology Database classification for Mammut as Eucarya | Opisthokonta | Metazoa | Eumetazoa | Triploblastica | Nephrozoa | Deuterostomia | Chordata | Vertebrata | Gnathostomata | Osteichthyes | Sarcopterygii | Dipnotetrapodomorpha | Tetrapodomorpha | Tetrapoda | Reptiliomorpha | Anthracosauria | Batrachosauria | Cotylosauria | Amniota | Synapsida | Therapsida | Cynodontia | Epicynodontia | Eucynodontia | Probainognathia | Mammaliamorpha | Mammaliaformes | Mammalia | Theriamorpha | Theriiformes | Trechnotheria | Cladotheria | Boreosphenida | Theria | Eutheria | Placentalia | Afrotheria | Pseudoungulata | Paenungulata | Tethytheria | Proboscidea | Elephantiformes | Elephantimorpha | Mammutida | Mammutidae | Mammut along with populating the atomized taxonomy fields with values that correspond to those ranks, namely, class = "Mammalia" order = "Proboscidea" family = "Mammutidae" genus = "Mammut" scientificNameAuthorship = "Blumenbach 1799" namePublishedIn = "Handb. Naturg., ed. 6, 698." namePublishedInYear = "1799" taxonRank = "genus" nomenclaturalCode = "ICZN" taxonomicStatus = "accepted" vernacularName = "mastodon" In terms of search-ability, this recommendation preserves all the names, making it theoretically possible to search for any of them in an environment that supports full-text or substring searches that include the higherClassification field.

[debpaul]

Follow up. Will be good to include this information in the webinar being planned by Talia Karim and Virginia Scott (in early 2018) See. VertNet/dwc-qa-manage#20