Xper and associated programs have now existed for twenty years. They are dedicated to managing taxonomic descriptions, providing interactive free-access identification, constructing keys and diagnoses and analysing, comparing and measuring similarities between descriptions.

During these twenty years, each new taxonomic application has suggested improvement of knowledge representation, management functionalities, user interface and taxonomic tools. For example, in the past a tool to automatically write descriptions as readable text was developed to publish (in two languages) the descriptions of phlebotomine sandflies of French Guiana. Then an HTML export was added to Xper² for a quick on-line distribution of a knowledge base. Another example: a tool to compute similarities between descriptions was developed, then this tool was used to complete the taxonomic forms constructed automatically from a knowledge base to suggest the most similar taxa and the risk of misidentification. Recently the import/export in spreadsheet format appears important for practical use during an application on Flora of France.

We will discuss the positive and negative points of such developments and the gap between taxonomists’ needs and computer scientists’ objectives.

http://lis.snv.jussieu.fr/newlis/?q=en/resources/softwares/cai/xper2
http://lully.snv.jussieu.fr/xperbotanica/

We thank all the Xper² users for their profitable comments on the software.