[Taxacom] Fwd: complete list of all species

[Faunaplan at aol.com]

We already have so many wonderful online databases: plants, birds, reptiles, 
amphibians, fishes, Diptera, Orthoptera, ... and many more to come soon.  And 
yet, even based on such resources it would be an enormous task if you wanted 
to extract and join data to a common taxonomic "checklist"...
 
But, what if all these existing resources had something like a standardized 
checklist-style summary, a downloadable file that can be used like modules?
In my imagination, even a simple & handy extract could be useful in so many 
ways, - and the details could always be looked up in the original databases 
anyway.
This could give us something like a "master checklist" that could even serve 
as a default (but not the one and only) classification for GBIF's ECAT 
component.
 
Here is a simple idea of how a "modular" db-summary could look like:
 
SortA | SortB | SortC | Rank# | Name | ValidName | Geospatial
 
In this example, the fields "SortA - B - C" could provide the systematic 
sorting order, so that you can easily join modules or pieces of modules. In 
addition, these structured sortcodes can have substrings for all groups, so that you 
can address any taxon by its sortcode (e.g., a particular subtribe).
The field "Rank#" could have numbers for all ranks from kingdom down to 
terminal taxa (species, subspecies), and accepted names can be marked, e.g. by "a", 
synonyms by "b". This would allow users to pick out, e.g., all ranks <21 if 
they only need the classification to genus-level, etc.
The field "Name" is for all names (incl. syns)
The field "ValidName" has the valid (accepted) Code-compliant names
The field "Geospatial" could have coded info on country distribution
 
and I can provide a more detailed example, off-list
 
Just an idea ...
 
Best wishes
Wolfgang
 
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Wolfgang Lorenz
Faunistics & Environmental Planning
Hoermannstr. 4
D-82327 Tutzing
Germany