Friday, August 14, 2015

Possible project: NameStream - a stream of new taxonomic names

Yet another barely thought out project, although this one has some crude code. If some 16,000 new taxonomic names are published each year, then that is roughly 40 per day. We don't have a single place that aggregates these, so any major biodiversity projects is by definition out of date. GBIF itself hasn't had an update list of fungi or plant names for several years, and at present doesn't have an up to date list of animal names. You just have to follow the Twitter feeds of ZooKeys and Zootaxa to feel swamped in new names.

And yet, most nomenclators are pumping out RSS feeds of new names, or have APIs that support time-based queries (i.e., send me the names added in the last month). Won't it be great to have a single aggregator that took these "name streams", augmented them by adding links to the literature (it could, for example, harvest RSS feeds and Twitter streams of the relevant journals), and provided the biodiversity community with a feed of new names and associated supporting information. We could watch new discoveries of new biodiversity unfold in near real time, as well as provide a stream of data for projects such as GBIF and others to ingest and keep their databases up to date.