[uf-discuss] species microformats & OpenSearch

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <004101c7198e$273f78b0$75be6a10$@ca>, "Shorthouse, David"
<dps1 at ualberta.ca> writes


>[David Shorthouse wrote:]
>
>Indeed, this is a lot like tagging and are nothing more than links to other
>species pages in an attempt to permit users a chance to quickly get to
>information about other species in the same Genus as the one on the
>currently visible page. Also in a trivial way, this is to permit search
>engine "spiders" a chance to navigate the thousands of pages.

I don't think the above makes any sense.

>What is actually more useful from a taxonomic standpoint are the "Synonyms
>and Other Recognized Nomenclature" tables on each species page that are the
>1:1 mappings of historic nomenclature to that currently recognized. These of
>course also have LSIDs.

and could again be interrogated by a user agent/ tool which took a
marked-up binomial and passed it to the relevant search page.

>* confirm whether or not the above model is the most common way of
>publishing species mentions
>[David Shorthouse wrote:]
>In fact, there is no model. The vast majority of similar species pages have
>no common ground, no tagging, and are merely free-form text with images.

Quite. And that's what the current proposal addresses.

>Speaking about spiders, the authoritative work for their nomenclature
>is the World Spider Catalog:
>http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog/INTRO1.html, which is
>essentially an HTML representation of a paper-based publication with no
>means to programmatically tap into the data.

The current proposal provides a means for a user agent/ tool to
programmatically tap into such data.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
                Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards:  <http://www.no2id.net/>

                Free Our Data:  <http://www.freeourdata.org.uk>