CONTENT - International Society of Zoological Sciences

S5 ICZ2008 - Abstracts
e-Publish or Perish
Sandra Knapp 1 and Debbie Wright 2
1
Department of Botany, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell
Road, London SW7 5BD, UK
2
Wiley-Blackwell, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
Access to the published literature of science is increasingly
becoming digital. Journals provide on-line early access, and as the
Internet reaches more corners of the world, scientists are turning to
electronic publications as a first port of call in doing research. As the
world becomes more and more digitally organised and accessible, it
is critical that taxonomic work is not left behind to languish in printonly
journals. Taxonomic publication is perhaps unique in the
scientific literature in remaining relevant for nomenclatural purposes
“forever”, thus creating a conservative and cautious attitude amongst
taxonomists for changes in publication methods. The two central
pillars of all four organismal codes (zoology, botany, bacteria and
cultivated plants) are validity of publication and the principle of
priority, but the rules governing publication are arguably the most
important, as it is through reference to publications that hypotheses
as to taxon identity are supported or rejected. We will discuss the
main issues besetting acceptance of electronic publication for
nomenclatural acts – essentially new names, synonymies and
typifications. These are 1) archiving, 2) accessibility, 3) date of
publication and 4) type of electronic medium. We will also touch on
how electronic publication might interface with registration of names,
another subject of considerable debate in some taxonomic
communities. Issues surrounding access to new names and
nomenclatural acts transcend their medium of publication, but as our
world becomes digital, taxonomists must not be left behind. The
products of taxonomy are just too useful to suffer that fate.
Linnaeus – Sherborn - Zoobank
Ellinor Michel 1 and Andrew Polaszek 2
1 International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, c/o Natural
History Museum, Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD, London, UK
2 Dept. of Entomology, Natural History Museum, London, UK
The monumental task of cataloguing the scientific names of animals,
begun 250 years ago by Linnaeus, is entering a new golden age.
Within the 823 pages of the 10 th edition of Systema Naturae
Linnaeus catalogued 313 genera and 4,397 species. The journal
Zoological Record, currently the most exhaustive annual catalogue
of newly-published animal names and nomenclatural acts in zoology,
includes approximately 1.7 million names in the database on which it
is based - the Index of Organism Names. Zoological Record started
in 1864 and has continued uninterrupted to the present day,
cataloguing about 16,000 new names every year. Between 1902 and
1933 Charles Davies Sherborn published the formidable Index
Animalium - 11 volumes (including the indexes) and more than 9,000
closely-typed pages covering animal names from 1758-1850.
Sherborn personally researched and checked information for Index
Animalium almost exclusively from the original sources. It is therefore
astonishing that 20 years after Sir Robert May lamented the absence
of a "centralized computer index of these recorded species" in the
journal Science (referring to all organisms), such a catalogue is still
incomplete. The encouraging news is that efforts over the last four
years are bringing together several initiatives, including those
mentioned above but also several that we will hear about during this
meeting. These initiatives, together with the establishment of
ZooBank as a registry for animal names and nomenclatural acts,
suggest that the combined vision of Linnaeus, Sherborn, May,
Wilson and others will soon become a reality.
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Future taxonomy - bigger, better, faster.
David Patterson
Informatics lead, 7 MBL Street, MA 02543, Woods Hole, USA
Taxonomy is usually seen as the source of our catalog of biodiversity,
but taxonomists also have been managers of information about
organisms. The informatics role has been made possible through two
features that were embedded in taxonomic practices established by
Linnaeus, the use of names and h! ierarchies. With the maturation of
the internet into a near universal network interconnecting distributed
information, taxonomy has new devices available to it to assist in its
role of managing information. The start of 21st century is a time of
special opportunity to reinvent taxonomy with much greater
relevance and visibility. This requires taxonomists to acknowledge
and develop their role as informaticians. Taxonomy can extend
beyond the development of the catalog of diversity, but to do so it
must commit to communal processes rather than individual products,
to eschew parochiality, to set an aggressive agenda of getting all
useful information into publicly accessible internet-accessible forms,
and to reassess familiar issues such as nomenclature to develop the
use of names as metadata in on-line information management. The
incorporation of taxonomic practices into the design of data bases,
software, and services is referred to as taxonomic intelligence. A
taxonomi! cally intelligent names-based infrastructure underpins the
Encyclopedia of Life project. EOL has confirmed the capacity of a
names-based infrastructure to interconnect any data object for any
taxon, to represent alternative views of taxa and systematics, to
create new and accessible identification tools, to accelerate
discovery and the quality of taxonomic judgments, and the evolution
of taxonomic concepts.
Zoobank : reviewing the first two years, and preparing for the
next 250
Richard Pyle, Miguel Alonso-Zarazaga, Nina G. Bogutskaya,
Philippe Bouchet, Denis J. Brothers, Daphne G. Fautin, Mark J.
Grygier, Bruce R. Halliday, Maurice Kottelat, Frank-Thorsten Krell,
Sven O. Kullander, Gerardo Lamas, Susan Lim, Shunsuke F.
Mawatari, Alessandro Minelli, Peter K.L. Ng, Thomas Pape, Laszlo
Papp, David J. Patterson, Gary Rosenberg, Pavel Stys, Jan van Tol,
Zhi-Qiang Zhang
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature,
http://www.iczn.org/
In 2005, the ICZN Secretariat and Commissioners proposed
“ZooBank” as a web-based registry of zoological names and
nomenclatural acts. The ZooBank web site was launched as a
prototype on January 1 st , 2008, coinciding with the 250 th anniversary
of the official start of Zoological Nomenclature. At its launch, the
ZooBank registry included all 4,819 names established in the 10 th
edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, as well as five new fish
species names established in an article published concurrently with
the launch of ZooBank.
ZooBank is not intended to replace existing nomenclatural catalog
databases, and it makes no assessment or judgment of the
taxonomic content of any published work. ZooBank assigns unique
registration identifiers in four information domains of relevance to the
ICZN Code: nomenclatural acts (including new names and other acts
that affect existing names), publications, authors, and type
specimens. These identifiers are envisioned as pointers to
authoritative information concerning zoological nomenclature, and
are expected to become integral to current and future efforts to index
taxonomic content.
The complete implementation details of the ZooBank registry are
currently being discussed, developed, and tested, with involvement
from ICZN Commissioners, nomenclatural data managers, and the
taxonomic community at large. Many questions concerning technical
implementation details, content sourcing and prioritization,
information quality standards, and scenarios for mandatory
registration are open to discussion. As much as there is an urgent
need to answer these questions soon, there is also the need to “get it
right”, ensuring a solid foundation for the next 250 years of zoological
taxonomy.