Support IOC list

Issue #24 resolved
Adam Winer created an issue

Original issue 24 created by adam_winer on 2011-01-04T17:00:31.000Z:

The IOU list (http://www.worldbirdnames.org/) is increasingly widely used. Scythebill should offer support for storing lists under the IOU taxonomy.

Ideally, the support would allow switching a list between Clements and IOU arbitrarily.

Some limitations: - The IOU list does not include subspecies. - Some decision would need to be made about "proposed-splits"; count them as groups a la Clements? Or as full species?

The ideal approach, I think, would be to treat the Clements list (with subspecies) as the "master" list, and include an IOU mapping as an overlay; e.g. : taxon T from Clements is taxon T' from IOU. I'd imagine the format to be like the existing taxonomy XML file…:

  • High-level taxa (order/family, maybe genus) separately maintained.
  • Species-level entries with references to the corresponding clements ID, with overrides where necessary
  • Group and subspecies entries unnecessary, as they follow from the species, except where splits are concerned: if in species S, group G or subspecies SSP is already mapped to a full species in IOU, don't bother showing it as an entry in species S. And except where lumps are concerned - that'd need some additional (and hard-to-automate) metadata.

Comments (3)

  1. Log in to comment