The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) is building a distributed computing platform that assists taxonomists to do taxonomy efficiently, expediently, and via the web. At the heart of this network is a shared domain model, EDIT's Common Data Model (CDM). The UML has been chosen to define the object oriented domain model which is still under active development. From this platform independent model a Java specific UML model is derived which in turn is translated into Java source code using Enterprise Architect. The Java classes, together with a persistency and a thin service layer, are then released to be used by several applications within EDIT and also as part of the CATE project.

The CDM is being modeled mainly with the TDWG schemas and ontology in mind, but also incorporating ideas from the Berlin Model, CATE, BibTex and others. For serialization XML together with XML schemas has been selected. For the purpose of a tightly integrated domain model the TDWG ontology did not seem appropriate and unfortunately the existing TDWG XML schema standards did not integrate well with each other. The upcoming CDM will therefore be yet another data model, but an integrated one, with a single XML schema which will translate to current TDWG standards nicely.

http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/wiki/CommonDataModel http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CdmLibrary http://www.cate-project.org/