Hi Peter. I'm curious why you changed the Scientific Name for Dog to just "familiaris". All the other subspecies have the full name. I changed it back to "Canis lupus familiaris".
Scientific name for Dog
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Hey Jeff,
I'm unfamiliar with scientific naming schemes for organism classifications, so I'm sure I'm probably wrong. My thought was that it aided in composability of scientific names. It sortof violated some database normalization impulse of mine; we've already captured that Dogs are a subspecies of lupus (itself a species in the genus Canis), so having the scientific name for species and subspecies include that redundant data could make it more difficult to work with scientific names programmatically. It also fell in line with the usage of the Scientific Name field of higher-level Organism Classifications.
If that's not how it should be, I think I messed up pretty much all of the species and subspecies under Caninae... -
jg is planning a big data load of species/genus/family etc. from Wikipedia, cross-correlated with other species databases. This will fill in all the empty fields. You can check out the Organism Classification discussion.
The data load will use the standard full names like "Canis lupus familiaris". If you want to make a case for the truncated names, you might want to post it there. But I think it's pretty standard to show the full names. See, for example:
Wikispecies
ITIS
One might argue that if your database is smart enough to know that the species name "lupus" should be concatenated with the parent "canis" to get "canis lupus" (but that "canis" should not be concatenated with its parent "canidae" to get "canidae canis") then it would be smart enough to extract out the "lupus" from "canis lupus" if that's all you want.
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