EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

For the continued development, testing and assessment of the EDIT Common Data Model (CDM) as well as its related software products (e.g. data portal, taxonomic editor, import/export modules) the availability of real-world taxonomic data sets is essential. In collaboration with WP6 and other taxonomic initiatives, WP5 has organized the availability of eight significant taxonomic datasets and tested their compliance with the CDM model:

European Register of Marine Species (ERMS, http://www.marbef.org/data/erms.php)

Fauna Europaea http://www.faunaeur.org/

Euro+Med Plantbase http://ww2.bgbm.org/EuroPlusMed/query.asp

Dendroflora of El Salvador

AlgaTerra Information System on terrestrial and limnic Micro Algae http://www.algaterra.org

EDIT exemplar group: Palmweb http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/dataportal/palmae/

EDIT exemplar group: Diptera http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/dataportal/diptera/

EDIT exemplar group: Cichorieae http://wp6-cichorieae.e-taxonomy.eu/

The three major European checklist projects ERMS (European Register of Marine Species), Fauna Europaea, and Euro+MedPlantbase will be integrated and made accessible under a common portal in the course of the 7^th framework project PESI (A Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure, http://www.eu-nomen.eu/pesi/). The integrated database will be based on a CDM data store, which will be used to import checklist data into a single harmonized repository, to check various data quality aspects, to provide checklist data in standardized formats via web services, and to export data into a joined PESI/EDIT data warehouse structure used by the PESI portal for human readable data publication. A first PESI portal prototype will already be demonstrated during the 2009 e-Biosphere conference (1-3 June 2009, http://www.e-biosphere09.org/

The Euro+Med Plantbase project will be fully moved into the CDM after the publication of Platform version 2, the Fauna Europaea project will follow.

The data of the Dendroflora of El Salvador project represent an almost finished checklist project treating taxonomic core data only. The production of the second volume of that checklist will be used to test the CDM’s taxonomic core functionality and the integrity of database changes made with the EDIT Taxonomic Editor.

The data of the AlgaTerra information system treats certain nomenclatural and taxonomic intricacies in great detail (for example, the use of images as nomenclatural types). AlgaTerra is therefore to be used to test such extensions for the core taxonomic functionality in the CDM library.

The three exemplar groups cover the entire range of data which taxonomists want to publish. These are incrementally introduced into the functionality of the portal, followed by the Editor and other CDM-based software.

The Diptera exemplar group as well as the Fauna Europaea database serve to confirm the conformity of the CDM with zoological data. Conformity with botanical data is ensured because of the CDM’s compatibility with the Berlin Model.

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