Quick notes on modelling taxonomic names in databases, as part of an ongoing discussion elsewhere about this topic. Simple model One model that is widely used (e.g., ITIS, WoRMS) and which is explicit in Darwin Core Archive is something like this: We have a table for taxa and we don't distinguish between taxa and their names. the taxonomic hierarchy is represented by the parentID field, which points to your parent.

Yet another taxonomic database, this time I can't blame anyone else because I'm the one building it (with some help, as I'll explain below). BioNames was my entry in EOL's Computable Data Challenge (you can see the proposal here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92091). In that proposal I outlined my goal: The bulk of the funding from EOL is going into interface work by Ryan Schenk (@ryanschenk), author of synynyms among other cool

It is well known that phylogeny databases such as TreeBASE capture a small fraction of the published phylogenies. This raises the question of how to increase the number of trees that get archived.

This post was prompted by Stephen Thorpe's post on TAXACOM about Wikispecies in which he wrote (in a thread discussing Roger Hyam's recent blog post) that I beg to differ. Wikispecies runs on a database (the Mediawiki software uses a database to store the wiki), and Mediawiki can be thought of as a database of semi-structured text, but it lacks a lot of the functionality database users would expect.

This post is likely to seem somewhat off the wall, given the rush to getting everything in the cloud, but it's Friday, so let's give it a whirl. One idea I've been toying with is dispensing with relational databases, wikis, etc. and just storing taxonomic data using files and folders on a disk.