evidence, the name of the author, if cited, should be enclosed in square brackets to show the original anonymity". Initials If the same surname is common to more than one author, initials are sometimes given (for example "A. Agassiz" vs. "L. Agassiz", etc.), but there are no standards concerning this procedure and not all animal groups / databases use this convention. Although initials are often regarded as useful to disambiguate different persons with the same surname, this does not work in all situations (for example "W. Smith", "C. Pfeiffer", "G. B. Sowerby" and other names occur more than once), and in the examples given in the Code and also the ICZN Official Lists and Indexes, initials are not used. Implications for information retrieval For a computer, O. F. Müller, O. Müller and Müller are different strings, even the differences between O. F. Müller, O.F. Müller and OF Müller can be problematic. Fauna Europaea is a typical example of a database where combined initials O.F. and O. F. are read as entirely different strings so those who try to search for all taxonomic names described by Otto Friedrich Müller have to know (1) that the submitted data by the various data providers contained several versions (O. F. Müller, O.F. Müller, Müller and O. Müller), and (2) that in many databases, the search function will not find O.F. Müller if you search for O. F. Müller or Müller, not to mention alternative orthographies of this name such as Mueller or Muller. Thus, the usage of (e.g.) genus-species-author-year, genus-author-year, family-author-year, etc. as "de facto" unique identifiers for biodiversity informatics purposes can present problems on account of variation in cited author surnames, presence/absence/variations in cited initials, and minor variants in style of presentation, as well as variant cited authors (responsible person/s) and sometimes, cited dates for what may be in fact the same nomenclatural act in the same work. In addition, in a small number of cases, the same author may have created the same name more than once in the same year for different taxa, which can then only be distinguished by reference to the title, page and sometimes line of the work in which each name appears. In Australia a program was created (TAXAMATCH) that provides a tool to indicate in a preliminary manner whether two variants of a taxon name should be accepted as identical or not according to the similarity