Teleconference 24 25 September 2019

Participants

Steve Baskauf, Jeff Gerbracht, Niels Klazenga, Rich Pyle, William Ulate, Cam Webb, Greg Whitbread

Things discussed

• Relationship types to do with hybrids, fungi life stages and ambiregnals have been put aside, as we don't know of any implementations. Once a use case becomes apparent, we can work out how to best deal with it under the standard. This leaves, apart from the RCC-5 relationships we discussed at the previous meeting, only vernacular name.

• TCS treats vernacular names as labels for different Taxon Concepts, which are linked to the concept bearing the scientific name through a Taxon Relationship (of the type 'vernacular name'). While this should work at the data level, it goes against the grain and is not how people deal with vernacular names in practice. Therefore, we decided on an approach similar to the GBIF Vernacular Name Extension and have a vernacularNames property on the Taxonomic Name Usage. The object of this property is an array of VernacularName objects. The Vernacular Name class, at a minumum, contains taxonomicNameUsage, language and preferredName (boolean) properties. Most other properties in the GBIF extension seem already covered in Taxonomic Name Usage, but we'll go over them and see which ones we should borrow.

• At the beginning of the discussion about vernacular names, it was thought that we needed a clear dichotomy between scientific names and vernacular names (accompanied by good definitions for both terms). This has become much less important, as the distinction is in how a name is being used. If a "vernacular name" (a string that we would normally consider a vernacular name) is the only name there is, it is the taxonomicName. A VernacularName according to the standard is an alternative (label) for the taxonomicName.

• We had twenty minutes left to discuss (nomenclatural) types. The group, in majority, thinks that typifications are best dealt with using Darwin Core Identifications. There might arise a need for a "dumbed down" (@deepreef) version in the standard, but for now we are happy to leave it out.