How best to manage paleo taxa?

[dennereed]

There is a good description with examples in the general Darwin Core QA thread on the use of taxonomic fields for neontological and paleontological data.

https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-qa/issues/48

Is there a good resource for providing taxonIDs (i.e. URIs for taxa) for paleobiology? Is there a way to record whether a taxon is extant or extinct?

[hollyel]

Additional questions/thoughts for paleo taxa:

It is important to serve both dwc:higherClassification and dwc:taxonRank for paleo specimens. These terms help aggregators and downstream users better understand the given taxonomy. It would also ideally help to improve the cleaning algorithms used by the aggregators in the long-term as we work with them to improve that process. An additional thread will need to be added to discuss the larger taxonomy problems that exist in GBIF and iDigBio (and other portals probably). I also imagine we may need to break this out into multiple issue threads for various terms.

[mjcollin]

I realize this also doesn't answer your question directly, but in https://github.com/tdwg/bdq/issues/173 we proposed starting to use identificationVerificationStatus as another field to help aggregators know if your identification information should be matched up with taxon ids from some backbone or just treated as-is. An example would be new species that are not in any backbone yet.

The main Darwin Core repo also has an open ticket to add examples for this term: https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/141

Parking this thought here - feel free to split tickets and rework later.