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
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