Mechanisms for coordination and delivery of descriptive data and taxon profiles in the Australasian Biodiversity Federation
Alex R. Chapman
Abstract
A summary of the development and delivery of descriptive data within keys and taxon profile pages in Australia, with particular focus on ‘FloraBase - the Western Australian Flora’ as a case study for information assembly and coordination.
Structured taxonomic descriptive data standards enable the rigorous capture of taxon data at an atomic character level, for delivery in interactive identification, information retrieval and natural language descriptions.
Coordinating the capture of coded descriptive data for one taxonomic group becomes more complex with additional contributors. Integrating descriptive data across taxonomic groups requires an agreed vocabulary and definition of characters and states even when the morphology is non-homologous; once again coordination becomes more complex with increased variety of taxonomic groups.
While there are some notable large-scale collaborative descriptive projects scoring atomic character data across large geographic and taxonomic extents, there is more commonly a disjunction when existing data from various authoritative sources is assembled. In these cases a more generalised schema defining higher-level aggregated descriptive components can be used.
In Western Australia, with 3% of the world's vascular flora, a mixed strategy is maintained. Detailed coded data for the 1300 families and genera allows the publication of a comprehensive set of interactive keys and scientific descriptions from a single source. At the species level, some 13,000 short coded descriptions are maintained, as well as a growing set of free-text descriptions from online journals, archived floras or stand-alone projects.
Nationally, the Flora of Australia volumes have been marked up with XML schema identifying larger blocks of descriptive text. This schema may provide a common reference standard for marking up species-level descriptions from the many potential sources. With the upcoming 'Atlas of Living Australia' and global 'Encyclopedia of Life' projects, the identification of standard components on taxon profile pages and a mechanism for reliable tagging will be required.
Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) can flag available elements for interrogation and retrieval, with the potential for automated sharing, re-use and re-assembly of authoritative content. This has the benefit of allowing the dwindling pool of specialists to focus on the development, publication and maintenance of content.
Structured taxonomic descriptive data standards enable the rigorous capture of taxon data at an atomic character level, for delivery in interactive identification, information retrieval and natural language descriptions.
Coordinating the capture of coded descriptive data for one taxonomic group becomes more complex with additional contributors. Integrating descriptive data across taxonomic groups requires an agreed vocabulary and definition of characters and states even when the morphology is non-homologous; once again coordination becomes more complex with increased variety of taxonomic groups.
While there are some notable large-scale collaborative descriptive projects scoring atomic character data across large geographic and taxonomic extents, there is more commonly a disjunction when existing data from various authoritative sources is assembled. In these cases a more generalised schema defining higher-level aggregated descriptive components can be used.
In Western Australia, with 3% of the world's vascular flora, a mixed strategy is maintained. Detailed coded data for the 1300 families and genera allows the publication of a comprehensive set of interactive keys and scientific descriptions from a single source. At the species level, some 13,000 short coded descriptions are maintained, as well as a growing set of free-text descriptions from online journals, archived floras or stand-alone projects.
Nationally, the Flora of Australia volumes have been marked up with XML schema identifying larger blocks of descriptive text. This schema may provide a common reference standard for marking up species-level descriptions from the many potential sources. With the upcoming 'Atlas of Living Australia' and global 'Encyclopedia of Life' projects, the identification of standard components on taxon profile pages and a mechanism for reliable tagging will be required.
Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) can flag available elements for interrogation and retrieval, with the potential for automated sharing, re-use and re-assembly of authoritative content. This has the benefit of allowing the dwindling pool of specialists to focus on the development, publication and maintenance of content.