Should we add lots of vernacular names to the synonyms list

[mtholder]

Pros:

• would make tree browsing much easier

Cons:

• internationalzation
• lots of new synonyms (probably not a big deal for smasher or taxomachine)
• some vernacular names are homonyms for lots taxa that are not closely related (e.g. "robin")

See https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups&hl=en#!topic/opentreeoflife/4jDcxryXWxg

[jar398]

I think I asked around about this one a while ago, and decided to remove
them. I think many common names were mapping to a large number of different
species, and that was an annoyance during taxonomy synthesis. So the code
would probably have to tweaked to make them second-class synonyms (i.e. not
ones that would allow transitive synonymy across source taxonomies).

We have easy access to NCBI common names, e.g.
56350 | American kestrel | | common name |
100819 | common kestrel | | genbank common name |
148594 | lesser kestrel | | genbank common name |
1562128 | South African kestrel | | genbank common name |

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 7:49 AM, Mark T. Holder notifications@github.com
wrote:

Pros:

• would make tree browsing much easier Cons:
  • internationalzation
  • lots of new synonyms (probably not a big deal for smasher or
    taxomachine)
  • some vernacular names are homonyms for lots taxa that are not
    closely related (e.g. "robin")

See
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups&hl=en#!topic/opentreeoflife/4jDcxryXWxg

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#160.

[jar398]

I don't know what next steps are for this issue, so I'm going to assign it to Mark and flag it 'needs discussion'.

[josephwb]

i added a hesitant thumbs-up. it might be useful in the tree viewer (e.g. educational purposes) and perhaps sometimes curating trees (i've run across this once or twice), but i understand the cons.

[jar398]

There's this pull request, which implements a simple common names feature. Common names are not used in taxon matching, but will be available to tools that want them. This doesn't take language into account unfortunately - ideally vernaculars would be tagged with the applicable language.

#358