Difference between revisions of "Taxon lists for DiversityMobile"

Revision as of 07:20, 11 June 2012

The IBF project/ DiversityMobile (smartphone app, app for Tablet PCs), the German Barcode of Life (=GBOL) project as well as many other biodiversity research projects depend on national/ regional species checklists/ taxon reference lists.

Species checklists/ taxon reference lists are essential as underlying standard lists (backbones) for web presentation services and (search) interfaces (e. g. as scroll lists). They are needed as dynamic service (database views and exports, web services) and as non-dynamic exports in various schemas and formats for external local database applications.

Such lists as managed by DiversityTaxonNames (=DTN) databases in a Diversity Workbench (= DWB) environment are called DTN taxon lists.

DTN taxon lists might be created (a) by direct import of taxon names from tab separated list files in a DWB environment, (b) by adding the relevant list information to nomenclators and species/ taxon databases already available as project in a DTN database of any DWB environment (e. g. GBIFnomenmyx, LIASnames, MELnames, MSWnames in the DWB environment of the SNSB, and UBTgallnames in the open TNT environment) and in future (c) by using the freely available (global) name thesauri e. g. via SOAP web services of Catalogue of Life (CoL), of Species File Software (SFS), IndexFungorum etc. to create a new DTN taxon list in a DTN database - [functionality "c" not yet implemented in DTN client!].

The existing DTN taxon lists in the context of IBF, LIAS and GBOL are built by either the method (a) or (b). They rely on expert taxonomists (= list curators) who collect information from published resources as national checklists and taxonomic thesauri as the "Global Species Databases" from the Catalogue of Life initiative (GSDs).

The content of DTN taxon lists has to be continuously updated. The list curators will be responsible for managing that data preferably by using the DTN .Net clients on their desktops.

Additions and corrections are welcome and might be sent to the respective list curators or to the persons responsible for the common taxonomy of major initiatives or projects like LIAS and GBOL.

To document the content of the lists currently used in the IBF, LIAS and GBOL context and enlarge the acceptance within the project communities they will be accessible for open and free download as csv, xls, xml files via the GBOL portal, the GBIF-D portal and the DiversityMobile Wiki.

The DTN taxon lists do not compete against commented reference checklists/ red lists etc., published e. g. by the Bundesamt für Naturschutz as regular citable and copyrighted publications. They are non-commented outputs of a relational database system.

DTN databases in the DWB virtual server environment "TNT"

There are DTN databases for each major organism group in the DWB virtual server environment "Taxon Names and Terms (=TNT)". Each database has name projects with DTN taxon lists. Expert taxonomists and list curators will have access on project level to edit names data. The DTN taxon lists are accessible for web applications, e. g. through the DWB web editor for GBOL.

DiversityTaxonNames_Animalia