Catalog of Fishes 2.0: improving user services and preparing for community participation
Stanley Blum, Richard Pyle
Abstract
The “Catalog of Fishes”, edited by W.N. Eschmeyer, was published as a three-volume work in 1998. Since then, basic information about taxonomic names has been expanded to include recent opinions about taxa and classification, and the database has nearly doubled in size. Eschmeyer currently maintains the Catalog and is committed to doing so through at least 2008, but the long-term future of this critical resource needs to be addressed. We have evaluated several alternative models for maintaining the Catalog and believe that a community participation model is the most likely to succeed. In this model, authors of taxonomic acts (or someone acting for them) will have the ability to add records for taxa that have been newly described or revised, while peers and editors will have the ability to review and validate records.
With funding from the United States National Science Foundation we have recently begun a two-year project to prepare the Catalog for maintenance under that model. In particular, our goals are: (1) to migrate data contents into a form compatible with the recently adopted Taxonomic Databases Working Group standard for taxonomic data; (2) to improve end-user facilities, such as browsing and querying interfaces and support for downloads in widely used formats; (3) to develop policies for arbitrating disagreements about database content; (4) to develop a web application that enables remote users to login and create and edit database records; and (5) to develop web services to make the contents of the Catalog directly available to other databases that include basic taxonomic information about fishes.
Many of the challenges we will confront in this project will be common to other taxonomic databases. As the Catalog of Fishes moves to an open model of content management, we need to ensure that the credibility of the database is not diminished. Policies for managing content must be reviewed and agreed to by the larger taxonomic community. These policies will begin with commitments to have the database reflect only the content of the published literature and to have conflicting opinions represented fairly and openly. Another issue to be solved will be the partitioning of responsibility among databases with overlapping content, such as ITIS, Species 2000, ZooBank, FishBase, and the incipient Encyclopedia of Life.
With funding from the United States National Science Foundation we have recently begun a two-year project to prepare the Catalog for maintenance under that model. In particular, our goals are: (1) to migrate data contents into a form compatible with the recently adopted Taxonomic Databases Working Group standard for taxonomic data; (2) to improve end-user facilities, such as browsing and querying interfaces and support for downloads in widely used formats; (3) to develop policies for arbitrating disagreements about database content; (4) to develop a web application that enables remote users to login and create and edit database records; and (5) to develop web services to make the contents of the Catalog directly available to other databases that include basic taxonomic information about fishes.
Many of the challenges we will confront in this project will be common to other taxonomic databases. As the Catalog of Fishes moves to an open model of content management, we need to ensure that the credibility of the database is not diminished. Policies for managing content must be reviewed and agreed to by the larger taxonomic community. These policies will begin with commitments to have the database reflect only the content of the published literature and to have conflicting opinions represented fairly and openly. Another issue to be solved will be the partitioning of responsibility among databases with overlapping content, such as ITIS, Species 2000, ZooBank, FishBase, and the incipient Encyclopedia of Life.