dwc:taxonRank

[hollyel]

taxonRank is a recommended term for paleontological specimens. It is used to check/verify the given taxonomy for an occurrence record against taxonomic backbones by aggregators. The given taxonRank can inform how to clean taxonomy upon ingest.

In GBIF only about 35% of fossilSpecimen records have a value in taxonRank. Additionally, the values are not all valid or useful within the context of DwC. Often the rank of a given taxonomy does not have an equivalent term in DwC (e.g. Clade, Infraorder, subclass).

It would be useful to better define the best practice for this term in a paleontological context and to further contextualize the importance of this term with more detailed information about the data quality checks and the taxonomy cleanup steps that are based on it for the major aggregators.

[hollyel]

TDWG Data Quality TG4 discussion on building a vocabulary for taxonRank - tdwg/bdq#170

[hollyel]

Copied from Erica's post on the #30 thread:

From Matt during 11/28/2018 mtg: dwc:taxonRank tells the iDigBio matching algorithm which dwc taxon level field to weight the heaviest. So if we give iDigBio a taxonRank value that is not also a dwc field (e.g. subclass) then the matching is affected negatively.

[ekrimmel]

From discussion with Nicholas on 2019-11-20:

• dwc:taxonRank is very useful because it says not to try to get more specific with the matching than this rank (confirmation that iDigBio follows this logic; it is one of the first checks that takes place in the cleaning algorithm )
• iDigBio looks for dwc:verbatimTaxonRank first, then dwc:taxonRank
• but you get strange matches when you put in a value for dwc:taxonRank that doesn't correspond to a DwC taxonomic classification field
• if taxonRank is not provided then the iDigBio workflow will try to identify what the taxonRank is based on other terms provided

So what to do with specimens identified to a taxon rank that does not correspond to a DwC field? Should this be a broader community discussion? Suggesting a Darwin Core Hour webinar, see: VertNet/dwc-qa-manage#42