Allow pCat to override sCat

[mdoering]

There seems to be the need in rare cases to be able to override decisions in the sCat by the pCat. To what degree should this be allowed and what needs to exist to handle this both from IT and governance aspects?

• Can we modify the selected sCat plants taxonomy in pCat? How to respond to feedback like "This node of the higher tree is wrong and needs to be ..."
• who decides about the pCat content? a taxonomic board with col, gbif, eol, bold, bhl representatives? even wider community and we have clear rules what to accept?
• A change in the higher tree like modifying plants families will potentially have a huge impact on the consistency of the pCat taxonomy. can we manage that?

[yroskov]

CoL authors and editors are responsible for the taxonomy accepted in the Catalogue of Life.

[mdoering]

@yroskov maybe this simply comes down to how we name things. @timrobertson100 e.g. has suggested a name like "open backbone" might be better suited for the provisional catalogue. In any case there are requirements from GBIF and other users of the provisional catalogue that we need to accommodate. One goal is to be much quicker in the turnaround of feedback. Let's assume an obvious error is spotted. It should be possible that this error is removed in the pCat very quickly by intervention of the editorial board for the provisional catalogue - whoever that is. The sCat will retain the error until it is fixed by the authors.

If the issue is more of a subjective preference, things become much harder. Should there not at least be a way to start a discussion by proposing a concrete change backed by evidence in publications?

[yroskov]

Correction of a bug is not a problem. CoL authors with good IT and social infrastructure are doing this quite frequently.

The problem raises when different opinions are clashed. “Evidence in publications” does not have a weight in this case. The author of GSD has a right to follow his own hypothesis/concept in the CoL. This a beauty of the CoL which attracts our authors.

Yuri

From: Markus Döring notifications@github.com Sent: Monday, September 24, 2018 10:21 AM To: Sp2000/colplus colplus@noreply.github.com Cc: Roskov, Yury yroskov@illinois.edu; Mention mention@noreply.github.com Subject: Re: [Sp2000/colplus] Allow pCat to override sCat (#45)

@yroskovhttps://github.com/yroskov maybe this simply comes down to how we name things. @timrobertson100https://github.com/timrobertson100 e.g. has suggested a name like "open backbone" might be better suited for the provisional catalogue. In any case there are requirements from GBIF and other users of the provisional catalogue that we need to accommodate. One goal is to be much quicker in the turnaround of feedback. Let's assume an obvious error is spotted. It should be possible that this error is removed in the pCat very quickly by intervention of the editorial board for the provisional catalogue - whoever that is. The sCat will retain the error until it is fixed by the authors.

If the issue is more of a subjective preference, things become much harder. Should there not at least be a way to start a discussion by proposing a concrete change backed by evidence in publications?

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[mdoering]

See also #52 . The global team and the col+ project team has decided to use a single dataset i.e. catalogue that integrates both scrutinized and provisional information. The provisional infos therefore cannot override the scrutinized one