Aggiornamento del catalogo di Norman Platnick

[migdan]

Ricevo dalla mailing list dell'International Society of Arachnology:

 

Dear ISA members,

 

Norman Platnick has asked me to make you aware of the latest version of the Catalog which includes a number of important changes as outlined in his message below, not least of which is the current number of spider species. As always, we owe Norm - and Rob - a great deal of thanks for the huge amount of work involved in compiling and maintaining this invaluable resource four the arachnological community.

 

Best wishes,

 

Jason Dunlop

 

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Version 8.5 of the World Spider Catalog is now available at the usual site (http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog). There are a couple of notable milestones. We have finally passed the 40,000 mark for currently valid species (despite the recent valiant efforts of Mark Harvey and Leon Lotz in subtracting lots of useless names in Nephila and Cheiracanthium!). So please, let's not see any future references to spiders being a group of anything less than 40,000 species!

 

More important, for the future, is the superb job Robert Raven has done in getting unique Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) attached to each of the currently valid familial, generic, and specific names. These LSIDs use the format recently recommended by GBIF; the intent is that each of these identifying character strings will be attached permanently to both the present taxon name, and to the valid name should that change (due to synonymies, transfers, or other nomenclatorial alterations). The LSID strings all begin with the prefix "urn:lsid:", enabling future web browsers to find information about the taxon, anywhere it may lurk on the Internet, by searching for these URNs (universal resource numbers), much as they now search for URLs (a plug-in already exists for the Mozilla

 

browser, for example, for that purpose).

 

So, it should become possible to link entries in any specimen/locality database to the names in the catalog, as well as to entries in GenBank or on any web pages, via these LSIDs. It should also eventually become possible to have linked entries automatically updated, when new versions of the catalog are published. Obviously, substantial amounts of programming will be required before that vision becomes a reality, but we wanted to start making the LSIDs available now, so that anyone who wishes to forge such links in the future can begin to think about the process.

 

The actual numbers supplied are those that have been used in Robert's database conversion for several years now; he is currently completing the database conversion of the files for Version 8.5, and we hope to be able to make that database version of the catalog information available to the

 

community soon.

 

As always, but particularly relevant given this significant expansion of the catalog: if you notice any errors -- major or trivial -- in the catalog, please bring them to my attention (platnick@amnh.org) so that they can be fixed before the next version is released. Thanks, Norm Platnick