This a quick writeup of an analysis I did to make the case that the list of names held by the Index of Organism Names (ION) (part of Thomson Reuters) would be very useful for GBIF. I must declare a bias, in that I've spent a good chunk of the last 3-4 years exploring the ION database and investigating ways to link the taxonomic names it contains to the primary taxonomic literature, culminating in building BioNames.

Quick notes on taxonomic names (again). It's a continuing source of bafflement that the biodiversity community is making a dog's breakfast of names. It seems we are forever making it more complicated than it needs to be, forever minting new acronyms that pollute the landscape without actually contributing anything useful, and forever promising shiny new tools and services without every actually delivering them.

On eof the things BioNames will need to do is match taxon names to classifications. For example, if I want to display a taxonomic hierarchy for the user to browse through the names, then I need a map between the taxon names that I've collected and one or more classifications. The approach I'm taking is to match strings, wherever possible using both the name and taxon authority.

There are many reasons why the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) is in trouble, but fundamentally I think it's because of situation illustrated by following diagram.

As part of the discussion on whether legacy biodiversity literature matters a graph from the following paper came up: So, why is the Sarkar et al. graph bogus? Here is their graph (Fig. 3) for animals: This is the number of new animal species described each year, estimated by parsing taxonomic names and extracting the date in the taxonomic authority. There are two prominent "spikes" which are worrying.

Following on from my earlier post Linking taxonomic names to literature: beyond digitised 5×3 index cards I've been slowly updating my latest toy: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon This site displays a database mapping over 200,000 animal names to the primary literature, using a mix of identifiers (DOIs, Handles, PubMed, URLs) as well as links to freely available PDFs where they are available.

David King et al.'s paper "Towards the bibliography of life" http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2167 has just appeared in a special issue of ZooKeys . I've written a number of posts on this topic, so I've a few comments. King et al. survey some of the issues, but don't really tackle the big issue of how we're going to build this.

Here is my presentation from today's Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting.

Tomorrow is the Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting. It should be an interesting gathering, albeit overshadowed by the sudden death of Frank Bisby.