Globally Unique Identifiers For Names
There is a movement within the biodiversity informatics community to provide globally unique identifiers in the form of Life Science Identifiers (LSID) for all biological names. This would allow authors to cite names unambiguously in electronic media and reduce the significance of errors in the spelling of names or the abbreviation of authority names. Three large nomenclatural databases (referred to as nomenclators) have already begun this process, these are Index Fungorum, International Plant Names Index (IPNI) and ZooBank. Other databases, that publish taxonomic rather than nomenclatural data, have also started using LSIDs to identify taxa. The key example of this is Catalogue of Life. In the next step in integration, these taxonomic databases will include references to the nomenclatural databases using LSIDs.
Read more about this topic: Biological Classification
Famous quotes containing the words unique and/or names:
“... a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)