Thursday, March 15, 2007

rss feeds and new names alerts

I just discovered the new UBio RSS-Nomina Nova feed for new names. This is much more professional then what we have at antbase.org, but it also has a different function, that is to discover new names in the literature. And of course, that's what we are out for to secure we have a catalogue as complete as possible.

If you compare the results from NominaNova and with our still simple "New Taxa Notifyer" for the year 2006, the results are very different: 5 publications when searching for "Formicidae" of which one is counted twice, and 105 species described (including those in the NominaNova publictions) on our system, plus two more publications or10 species for 2007 .

As a collector of new names, I would like to be NominaNova to be complete, and in return, I would like to have the possibilty to send a feedback, if I discover a publication, that is not in their feed. This is my personal interest.

But there is also a wide service to the community, since other Website providers are using the UbioRSS-feed on their website to inform their audiences about new publications (eg antweb, the ant of the cachoeira nature reserve.

There is an additional suggestion. Since all the new ant systematics publications are read, the names checked for whether they are already in the Hymenoptera Name Server, and if not, the the name is linked to an existing name and a decision is made, of what kind the relation is and then entered into the HNS, it would be ideal, if this could flow directly into the Ubio system as well - which I hope Norm Johnson at the Hymenoptera Name Server, where the ant data reside as well, and UBio can sort it out?

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