World wide leps lists

[Markku Savela]

dyanega at pop.ucr.edu (Doug Yanega) writes:

> I've been seeking any and all electronic worldwide Lep lists for over 
> a year, and have yet to find one that is genuinely comprehensive and 
> up-to-date. Markku's is indeed the closest thing, but for my purposes 
> the interface is problematic (as noted, it is NOT compact);

I'm could produce "compact" version, if I could decide on what the
format would be. It would be a text file.

The most simplest would be just to have huge file with lines

   superfamily;family;subfamily;genus;species;ssp;author

or something similar. However that is not really "compact", as it
replicates a lot of higher taxa for each line. The files will be
large... (well, for lepidoptera, it would currently be about
30000-50000 lines).

Another possibility is to have something like

 123;superfamily;34
 124;family;123
 125;subfamily;124
 126;genus;125
 127;sp1;126
 128;sp1-ssp1;127
 129;sp1-ssp2;127
 129;sp2;126
 ..etc..

The id-numbers would be generated on the fly, and would change every
time I generate a new list. How to present synonyms and alternate
rankings?

I think the latter format is the most compact you can get. It can
easily be transformed to the first form, if required.

Of course my "project" is totally insane. I will never get it
completed... I too would like some already machine readable
information to complete it... :-)


 
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