This page is likely to change frequently and will hold our (JessieKennedy and RobertKukla 's) current position regarding the issues associated with the Taxon Concept Transfer Schema. We will try to state our views on discussion items and refer to the relevant discussions/emails and justify why we currently think the way we do - this is of course likely to change if we are convinced by other arguments.

names as entities in their own right

We are still not convinced that there is taxonomic/nomenclatural information relating to names that can not be expressed as properties of the first concept that used this particular name (original concept) or as relationship between concepts.

(see NamesVersusConcepts)

synonymy relationships established by people who are not the author

We accept that people want to establish such relationships without creating a concept in the process and work on a mechanism to integrate such opinions into the schema.

(see ...)

publications format

We are happy to adopt any format suggested by other standards. To clarify: microreference is not part of the full publication because we anticipated to use already existing library identifiers (i.e. DOIDs) which do not offer this sort of granularity.

(see ...)

meta data format

If a common meta data model is aggreed, we will likely adopt it.

(see MetadataElements)

relationship types

We are compiling a list of all possible concept (or other) relationships that need to be recorded. Please add to it.

(see RelationshipTypes)

versions of concepts

Our work is based on the assumption that original and revised concepts are derived directly from the original sources. Transcription errors can be corrected without generating a new version.

(see VersionsofConcepts)

Atomic Taxa/Concept Core

A need has been identified to reference/store concepts (or subsets of concepts) that don't have relationships as part of their definition. We are investigating a new concept type to accomodate this.

Self contained documents vs GUIDs

We were of the opinion that XML documents conforming to the should be as self contained as possible i.e. not require additional look ups. There needs to be a limit though how many levels of relationships should be included. Another school of thought is to only pass on the minimum of information required, which would be the GUID of the concepts if available. Hence we are introducing a mechanism to allow for empty concepts.

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