Monday, November 06, 2006

Identification service

Nick Hobgood emailed me asking whether iSpecies supports requests for identifications. In other words, is this fish Rudarius minutus?


iSpecies doesn't support requests, but it strikes me a useful idea if there was a place where such requests could be directed. The TAXACOM mailing list is one place I've seen requests made, but a mailing list is probably not the best forum. An interesting idea to pursue...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have always marveled at how quickly an identification post gets resolved on Taxacom. I do feel that this however will change should enough requests come in as there will be less of a 'feel good factor' in successful identifications and more of an 'oh no not another one'.

However, being constructive, it would be great if something like this could be factored into the IdentifyLife project (http://www.identifylife.org) that Kevin Thiele is kicking off.

Roderic Page said...

Mailing lists will also suffer from repeat requests that users could answer themselves if they had the tools and resources, especially as mailing lists have limited "memory" - they are essentially conversations. If identification requests (and the results) were recorded on a web site, people could simply look at those and they might discover "oh yeah, that's the animal I'm looking at as well", in the same way that people can discover solutions to bugs in software or hardware on the Net because somebody else has posted a solution.

Anonymous said...

And (again)... what about iSpecies dealing also with geographic distribution data of a target species, by retrieving a dot map and/or raw lat/long distribution data from web repositories of such data (OBIS, MANIS, ORNIS, HerpNet, etc.)?

Anonymous said...

We think so! For us this is Rudarius Minutus, the English name is Minute File Fish or Minute leatherjacket.
Marti e Miano
http://scubacqueando.blogspot.com

Kevin said...

nature photographer forums might be another resource to tap into for identification.

on a side note
would fishbase help?
http://www.fishbase.org/search.php