University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

Donald Hobern drew my attention to nice the way [iNaturalist displays
taxonomic splits](http://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_splits/4518): 
 
![Inaturalist](http://lh3.ggpht.com/-M3tOdilVotg/UWU4EuLDqcI/AAAAAAAACp4/D-MxlqOtKbs/inaturalist.png?imgmax=800 "inaturalist.png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="460" height="376"} 
In this example, observations identified as *Rhipidura fuliginosa* are
being split into *Rhipidura fuliginosa* and *Rhipidura albiscapa*. This
immediately reminds me of the idea which keeps circulating around,
namely using version control tools to manage taxonomic classification.
Some years ago David Shorthouse proposed managing taxonomic
classifications using version control, see [Taxonomic Consensus as
Software
Creation](http://ispiders.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/taxonomic-consensus-as-software.html).
I discussed this in [Taxonomy on a hard
disk](http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/taxonomy-on-hard-disk.html),
and Pierre Lindenbaum has an interesting post on treating the NCBI
taxonomy as a file system [A FUSE-based filesystem reproducing the NCBI
Taxonomy
hierarchy](http://plindenbaum.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/fuse-based-filesyetem-reproducing-ncbi.html). 
 
The idea is that a taxonomy, such as the GBIF backbone taxonomy, could
be placed in [GitHub](http://github.com) where people could clone it,
annotated, correct, edit, or otherwise mess with it, then GBIF could
pull in those edits and release an updated, cleaner taxonomy. If
software version control seems a bit esoteric, it\'s worth noting that
use of GitHub is rapidly becoming much more mainstream in science, and
not just for software development. People are using it to store versions
of data analysis (e.g., <https://github.com/dwinter/Fungal-Foray>) and
collaboratively write manuscripts (e.g.,
<https://github.com/weecology/data-sharing-paper>). The journal
[eLIFE](http://www.elifesciences.org/) is depositing articles there
(e.g., <https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-articles>). In addition
to all the infrastructure GitHub provides (the ability to identify who
did what and when, to roll back changes, to fork classifications, etc.)
there is also the attraction of not creating yet more software, but
simply editing a classification by moving folders around on your local
filesystem. The idea seems irresistible...

Donald Hobern drew my attention to nice the way iNaturalist displays taxonomic splits: In this example, observations identified as

 Rhipidura fuliginosa

are being split into

 Rhipidura fuliginosa

and

 Rhipidura albiscapa

. This immediately reminds me of the idea which keeps circulating around, namely using version control tools to manage taxonomic classification.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Time to put taxonomy into GitHub