Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits

Pilsk, Suzanne C.; Kalfatovic, Martin R.; Richard, Joel M.

doi:10.3897/zookeys.550.9673

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…8) allowing searching of every name that occurs in every part that was published from 1902 to 1933. Pilsk et al (2016) give details on the labor that went into the digitization and parsing data on each page, with the goal of achieving a 99.995% accuracy rate in converting the OCR text.…”

Section: Index Animalium Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Charles Davies Sherborn and the ‘Indexer’s Club’

Evenhuis

2016

The Indexer

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The first few words of the title of this symposium are "Anchoring Biodiversity Information". In order to properly anchor anything for a long-lasting future, a solid foundation needs to have been laid. For the zoological portion of biodiversity information, that firm foundation is best exemplified in the works of Charles Davies Sherborn. This man, like others of his ilk, was intimately focused on indexing names. This incredible focus was a lifelong passion for him and culminated in his 9500-page Index Animalium of over 400,000 names of animals. This Index represents not only one of the most prodigious efforts in publication by a single man and the single most important reference to names in zoology, but a permanent legacy to the efforts of an indexer that proved to be an inspiration to many.

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Section: Index Animalium Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Charles Davies Sherborn and the ‘Indexer’s Club’

Evenhuis

2016

The Indexer

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Reinforcing the foundations of ornithological nomenclature: Filling the gaps in Sherborn’s and Richmond’s historical legacy of bibliographic exploration

Dickinson¹

2016

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Due to its public popularity, ornithology has a huge corpus of scientific publication for a relatively small number of species. Although there are global checklists of currently recognised taxa, there has been only limited, mainly individual, effort to build a nomenclatural database that the science of ornithology deserves. This is especially true in relation to concise synonymies. With the arrival of ZooBank and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the time has come to develop synonymies and to add fuller bibliographic detail to databases. The preparation for both began at the start of the 20 th century with extensive work by Sherborn and Richmond. I discuss their legacy, offer notes on significant work since then, and provide suggestions for what remains to be done. To make solid the foundations for ornithological nomenclature and taxonomy, especially for synonymies, ornithologists will need to collaborate much more and contribute to the digital infrastructure.

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The use and limits of scientific names in biological informatics

Remsen¹

2016

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Scientific names serve to label biodiversity information: information related to species. Names, and their underlying taxonomic definitions, however, are unstable and ambiguous. This negatively impacts the utility of names as identifiers and as effective indexing tools in biological informatics where names are commonly utilized for searching, retrieving and integrating information about species. Semiotics provides a general model for describing the relationship between taxon names and taxon concepts. It distinguishes syntactics, which governs relationships among names, from semantics, which represents the relations between those labels and the taxa to which they refer. In the semiotic context, changes in semantics (i.e., taxonomic circumscription) do not consistently result in a corresponding and reflective change in syntax. Further, when syntactic changes do occur, they may be in response to semantic changes or in response to syntactic rules. This lack of consistency in the cardinal relationship between names and taxa places limits on how scientific names may be used in biological informatics in initially anchoring, and in the subsequent retrieval and integration, of relevant biodiversity information. Precision and recall are two measures of relevance. In biological taxonomy, recall is negatively impacted by changes or ambiguity in syntax while precision is negatively impacted when there are changes or ambiguity in semantics. Because changes in syntax are not correlated with changes in semantics, scientific names may be used, singly or conflated into synonymous sets, to improve recall in pattern recognition or search and retrieval. Names cannot be used, however, to improve precision. This is because changes in syntax do not uniquely identify changes in circumscription.These observations place limits on the utility of scientific names within biological informatics applications that rely on names as identifiers for taxa. Taxonomic systems and services used to organize and integrate information about taxa must accommodate the inherent semantic ambiguity of scientific names. RESEARCH ARTICLE Launched to accelerate biodiversity research A peer-reviewed open-access journalDavid Remsen / ZooKeys 550: 207-223 (2016) 208The capture and articulation of circumscription differences (i.e., multiple taxon concepts) within such systems must be accompanied with distinct concept identifiers that can be employed in association with, or in replacement of, traditional scientific names.

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Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits

Cited by 6 publications

References 17 publications

Charles Davies Sherborn and the ‘Indexer’s Club’

Charles Davies Sherborn and the ‘Indexer’s Club’

Reinforcing the foundations of ornithological nomenclature: Filling the gaps in Sherborn’s and Richmond’s historical legacy of bibliographic exploration

The use and limits of scientific names in biological informatics

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