Morphster* is a productivity tool for annotating specimen images and organizing the features into character state matrices suitable for phylogenetic reconstruction. Central to the architecture is distributed data integration where the data are tagged with global unique identifies (GUID); usually a life-science identifier (LSID). Source data for Morphster includes certain image databases, records from the uBio Taxonomic Name Server and Nomina Anatomica in the form of OBO ontologies. Each of these data sources associates a GUID with each record.

Persistent data records created by Morphster are tagged with LSIDs and made available per the protocol. For example, character definitions, character state definitions and the assignment of states to specimens are all separate records that may need to be archived and/or reused and are made uniquely identifiable. These records themselves reference the source images, the taxon and, usually, a field from the Nomina Anatomica. Thus, when resolving a Morphster LSID, the data returned will include a number of additional LSIDs. It is anticipated that Treebase II will store LSIDs in addition to encoded character states. The result will be a distributed data structure enabling on-line access to the complete provenance of a morphological phylogenetic study.

*The project (see http://www.morphster.org) is a collaboration with Julian Humphries and Timothy Rowe, Jackson School of Geology, University of Texas at Austin.