In the last ten years, tremendous progress has been made by the Biodiversity Informatics community. Very large online datasets are now available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and other online efforts. This has been made possible by the use of the latest technological advances in Service Oriented Architecture. The idea of combining these online data sources into a single interface to provide one page per species was first coined by Roderick Page in his iSpecies.org mashup [1][2].

In order to assist ecologists in their online information collection tasks, we developed an application that weaves data from different sources into a new service. TaxoBrowser is a mashup that combines taxonomic classification, distribution maps, images, and species descriptions in a user-friendly Web site [3].

TaxoBrowser is developed using Flex, the latest RIA (Rich Internet Application) technology from Adobe. Flex is an open source framework for building and maintaining Web applications that deploy on all major browsers [4].

The current version of TaxoBrowser uses different GBIF online services. The first one performs a search from taxonomic classifications and the second embeds distribution maps in a Web page. The user friendly navigation component guides users through taxonomic hierarchies by using a graph where each node represents a taxon that can be expanded by double-clicking. The selection of a taxon triggers an image search through the Yahoo Search Web service and displays a taxon description from Wikipedia.

[1] Page R.D. (2008), Biodiversity informatics: the challenge of linking data and the role of shared identifiers, Brief Bioinform. 2008 Sept. 9(5):345-54. [http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/9/5/345].
[2] Butler D. (2006), Mashups mix data into global service, Nature, 439(7072): 6-7.
[3] TaxoBrowser [http://biodiversitydata.blogspot.com/2009/10/taxobrowser-beta.html]
[4] Flex [http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/]