Our new collection manager for Ichthyology had some questions that I had trouble answering, because of how the Specify interface works. It has to with synonyms and how to handle these in queries amongst other things.
As a concrete example, they recently synonymized the taxon “Iranocypris typhlops” to “Garra typhlops”. This worked as intended:
However, there are several issues when wanting to use the preferred name in a query builder query.
First of all, when using the preferred name (“Garra typhlops”), the search comes up empty. Using the synonym name (“Iranocypris typhlops”) yields results, however.
This is rather unintuitive, we would say. Surely, you want to at least enable searches on the accepted/preferred name primarily and then the synonym secondarily?
I also noticed that for rank-specific taxon filters, the “name” field is unavailable and only “full name” can be used. Why is that? Especially in this case, it would help if we at least could filter on a species “name”, like you can with the “(any rank)” field:
The problem may also lay in the fact that only the child nodes could be synonymized, which is what really needs to happen, since the genus “Iranocypris” is the synonym to “Garra”. However, that can be made possible as I was told in the topic I posted some time ago here: