Hi John,
Funnily enough, I had a go at this idea a while back. I used the (then
current) IOC list and assigned each family a two-letter code and then each
species a five-number code. This meant that unless you had more than one
hundred subspecies, you'd never run out of numbers. I wanted to do this so that
even every subspecies had a number (and also ssp. that were dubious had one)
and even given lumps, splits, changes of genera, family and species names and
also English names, the number remained constant. The other advantage was that
it worked in different languages with different taxonomic standards.
I got as far as writing the idea up and assigning letter codes for all familes
and number codes for a few thousand species (and one or two sets of
subspecies), but never had time to carry it on.
I did have a nice email conversation with Frank Gill about it and he said
another group was looking into a similar project.
If anyone is interested, I can send on a copy of the (old) list and the
write-up on how it works.
Cheers,
Tony
|
