ABSTRACT
With the publication of Systema Naturae in 1758, Carolus Linnaeus launched a system for naming and classifying animals that would endure for the next two and a half centuries, right up until today. Throughout this amazingly long (in the context of scientific methodology) span of time, the “Linnaean Enterprise” of establishing “sense and stability” to animal diversity has expanded far more in content than it has in its basic goals, methods, and vision. This is not in any way a failure by the taxonomic community to evolve over the years so much as it stands as testament to the deep understanding and appreciation Linnaeus had for the natural living world. But Linnaeus was fortunate, in some sense, to have lived at a time when the entirety of zoological diversity could be represented in a single paper-printed volume. The names he gave the species he recognized were unique and unambiguous. He could not have known that, 250 years hence, despite a continued and accelerating process of species discovery, humanity would still not know the true extent of animal diversity even within an order of magnitude. He would have been irritated to note that his system of ordering names, which worked so well for a few thousand names in a single work, began to fray at the edges when information became dispersed, when zoologists continued to add to the system in different languages from distant corners of the earth, with access to different subsets of the existing
Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 173 Completing the Linnaean Enterprise ......................................................................................... 173 Linking Biodiversity Information through Names .................................................................... 175 The Role of ICZN and ZooBank ............................................................................................... 176
Implementing ZooBank: The Devil Hides in the Details .............................................................. 176 Initial Launch and Early Development ..................................................................................... 177 Globally Unique Identifiers ....................................................................................................... 177 Defining “Registration” ............................................................................................................. 178 What Data Objects Should Be Registered? ............................................................................... 179 Prospective Registration ............................................................................................................ 180 Retrospective Registration ........................................................................................................ 181 Quantity vs. Quality .................................................................................................................. 182
The Next 250 Years ........................................................................................................................ 182 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... 183 References ...................................................................................................................................... 183
system of names. As the literature on species descriptions grew, the challenge of keeping it accessible and regularized was met by a few visionary biologists.
