What is name matching?
The process of combining biodiversity data from multiple sources currently starts with matching of the Latin name strings for the organisms used in each dataset.
Studies often contain names that can not be unambiguously matched or miss out some names entirely.
When combining datasets, between 10% and 20% of names will fail to match perfectly and may need some human interaction or accepted error.
With datasets of many thousands of species this soon becomes a major hurdle that has to be crossed every time datasets are used in analyses
and is exasperated when more than two datasets are used.
It is better if study data can be matched once, at source, then linked on unambiguous name IDs rather than by matching potentially ambiguous name strings.
How Latin names are ambiguous
- __Homonyms__ are names that are spelt the same but refer to different things. Under the codes of nomenclature one of the names will always have presidence over another.
- Isonyms occur when a name is based on the same type specimen but published in multiple places. The majority of isonyms are created by the author publishing the name again (perhaps in a paper and in a flora or catalogue) and so have the same authors. There is no scope for taxonomic confusion in botany and the only scope for nomenclatural confusion caused by isonyms is citing the wrong reference as a place of original publication. In zoology the name string may have different dates thus causing matching failures even though the intent of the author was to name the same taxon.
- True
- Author String variation
- Legal
- Illegal
- Orthographical variants
- Errors
- OCR
- Typographic
