The Organism table contains one entry for every recommended taxon version key. In effect it can be considered as a special list containing all the UK taxa as defined by the NHM.  The only thing to note is that it does contain taxa (mostly at the higher taxonomic) level which are no longer considered valid. Mostly these are taxonomic levels which were correct in the past, but which are no longer considered appropriate.  These are indicated in the table with a 'Y' in the redundant_flag column. Apart from the top level (kingdoms) entries in the table have parent keys pointing to other Organisms. The parent key togteher with the rank and weight are used to derive the  lineage, and from that comes the sort order. Redundant entries have parents, but shouldn't have chlidren. This means that if data has been input against them it will appear in the correct order. The sort will differs from that on the individual lists, but everything will be included, apart from user defined  taxa. We hope shortly to have an addin available will will enable user defined taxa to be included.

With the lineage and the sort order it is possible to easily identify the children and parents of any given Organsim.  This has already been used in providing the Kingdom/Phylum/Class/Order and Family for each each Organism (see table Index_Taxon_Hierrachy). In the next release of Recorder it is intended to use the table when expanding the taxonomic hierarchy in reporting, which should eliminate the problems caused by badly constructed lists. The Sort Order is implemented in Index_Taxon_Name so this is the best place to get this for an xml report. The lineage can, however, be used to return all the parents or all the children for a selected organism. User defined function [dbo].[LCReturnFullHierarchy] illustrates the use of lineage to return the parents of an organism.