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AAFC-BICoE / dina-planning

AAFC-DINA planning repository
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How to edit incorrect taxa in Determination? #275

Open michellelocke opened 2 years ago

michellelocke commented 2 years ago

There is no way (or no way that we've been shown) to make edits to the taxon database that fills in the Determination. Here is an example I have:

Anasimyia orion (Hull 1943).

I can only find it in the Determination look-up as Lejops orion Hull 1943. This is old and outdated nomenclature. The genus Lejops was a dumping ground for species and many of the subgenera are being recognized as genera that are unrelated. The CNC taxonomy DB reflects the current concepts and lists orion in Anasimyia. The North American expert on Syrphids has updated the CNC taxonomy database to reflect current usage and our database is the most up-to-date source for this family in the world. Systema Dipterorum, which is where I believe Catalog of Life gets its Diptera taxonomy from, is not up-to-date and not easy to update. We need to be able to easily edit the taxonomy as there don't seem to be sources where this can easily happen.

Not being able to have up-to-date names means that our database will be storing old data and it will be very difficult for non-experts (students, volunteers) to add the correct info into determination as they will not understand that they have to look up an outdated name. Note having to look up a species by both genus and specific epithet also causes a huge problem here and it unlikely that many people, when given the most current name, would find the name filed under the old genus in Catalog of life. See issue #267 for more on that. It will also cause difficulties for people who just want to search our holdings.

cgendreau commented 2 years ago

That's why the CNC Checklist should be published as a starting point.

michellelocke commented 2 years ago

@cgendreau I don't understand how this will work. If we published it to gbif/catalog of life (?), would it be available for anyone to use or just to users of the DINA database? It is one thing for names to be available to us, internally, but it is another thing for it to be publicly available on such a widely used platform. We acknowledge that our database is only the world authority for some groups. For others it is severely lacking taxa or out of date.

The CNC Taxonomy database is publicly available but it is not used as a source for anything other than our own database.

cgendreau commented 2 years ago

It would be available to everybody, that's the goal and it's perfectly fine that it's only for some groups.

As you say, it is public & it would be immensely valuable for the world including for use in DINA when organized in a structured form using biodiversity informatics standards. We can start with major branches that you have full confidence in as a proof-of-concept - names not currently present in the Catalogue of Life would be great -, knowing that these can later be updated at any time.

michellelocke commented 2 years ago

I need to understand how this would actually work. I currently have no insight into what you continue to propose. This is why this conversation becomes very frustrating. We need to see a demo of what is proposed and how it would work.

I have many questions like:

The parts of our taxonomy database that are up-to-date are all over the place. Yes, certain areas we can say may have the best world taxonomy, but in other places, it's been in small sections, a genus here, a family there, or just sorting out names that are not found easily in other online sources. We really can't parse out sections to publish. It really is a jumble of current names and old names. How do we deal with publishing a dataset like that? We will have drawn from some of the same sources as CoL does to populate our initial dataset but then made our own updates. It will not always be easy to know which is the best.