Taxon name objects in SDD may have atomized taxon information (monomial, rank, etc.) but the scientific organism name may also be expressed as a whole simple as part of Label/Representation. In this case a language code is required to distinguish the scientific name from

In June 2008 a Taxacom discussion thread labeled "[Taxacom] Language tags for scientific names" discussed the various options of handling taxon names with a language tag. The discussion participants had widely varying perspectives and no immediate consensus could be found on attempting to register a language subtag for this purpose. The majority of the participants where, however, against using the Latin language tag ("la") for scientific names. Latin may cause spelling, grammar and prounounciation problems with software that is unaware of the special kind of latin being used here. Furthermore, it is important that the scientific name is recognized as being compatible with all other languages that may be present in Label/Representation.

As a result of this discussion, SDD documents are recommended to use the following private-use tag (i.e. starting with "x"):

• xml:lang="zxx-x-taxon"

zxx indicates that the element is non-linguistic, i.e. neutral to all other languages. This is the case for scientific taxon names, where spelling and script are uniform across all languages.

-- GregorHagedorn - 03 Jul 2008