EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The prototype of the references index (GBV demonstrator for the EDIT/BHL-Europe GRIB) was built by the German common library network GBV (Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund, Göttingen). It allows users to browse and search titles held by libraries of EDIT member institutions and will include library catalogue data from BHL-Europe/BHL institutions in the future.Test sets from FUB-BGBM, MFN, NNM Naturalis and NHML have been imported into and are in the process of being deduplicated within the GBV demonstrator.

Descriptive data are one of the most important categories of information produced by taxonomists when describing new species or performing taxonomic revisions. This is why the EDIT Common Data Model (CDM) is designed to include and store descriptive data. SDD is the current TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) standard for descriptive data. Most of the existing software managing descriptive data (e.g. Lucid, Xper², DiversityDescription) already support it, allowing their users to import or export descriptive datasets.

Due to the lack of quality and incompleteness of significant part of biological information research on biodiversity can be biased. Additional surveys directed to fill in all gaps in knowledge and recover a reliable picture of the distribution for highly diverse taxa are impossible to conduct because of limited time and resources. That is why alternatives to assess the reliability and/or enhance the information currently stored in biodiversity databases are preferred

The EDIT contract and consortium agreement specify that software produced in the project will be put under a public license and be distributed as open source. Sustaining the EDIT Platform thus means supporting the open source environment that allows maintenance and further development of the Platform. All partners involved in Platform software development are committed to attracting further project funding to improve the Platform, and some such projects are already in place (PESI, SYNTH¬ESYS II, BHL-Europe) and an increasing number of applications are being submitted.

This report describes application to map inventory completeness. The main conclusions raised by report C5.35 & C5.38 are that:
1. current species distribution information is biased and insufficient for most taxonomic groups
2. modelling methods can not provide reliable and useful distribution predictions if they are based in these biased of data.”
For that reason key tools to implement were identified which allow to:
1. examine the degree of completeness of distributional information,

This report deals with the practical achievement of the inventory of identification keys and related descriptive datasets, with emphasis on the metadata fields selected and some issues raised by this inventory. Relevant metadata fields have been selected into a pre-existing metadata list defined in the KeyToNature project. The aim was to keep a short number of fields in order to keep a moderate-sized table for the display and facilitate the appropriation by the future participants.

This is a report on the fourth ISTC meeting held in September 15-16, 2009 in Berlin, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem and a draft version of the fifth Joint Periodic Activity (JPA5) of Workpackage 5.
The following aspects were discussed:

The ISTC has decided that a co-ordinated international effort is needed to create an Internet Platform for Cybertaxonomy, i.e. a distributed computing platform that assists taxonomists to do revisionary taxonomy and taxonomic field work efficiently, expediently and via the web. EDIT initiated a series of MoUs, each identical except for the understandings or agreements stated in Paragraph 4. Four different documents initiated by the ISTC are available up to now. EDIT partners were be invited to sign up to whichever MoU they can

One of the EDIT achievements is a cybertaxonomy-platform (http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/platform/ ) providing a large range of computer tools for taxonomists (http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/platform/, http://www.bdtracker.net/). These tools are designed to assist the taxonomist from fieldwork to publication of results, including the management of descriptive data, which have a key role in the taxonomic revision process.

The EDIT platform for Cybertaxonomy is a suite of loosely coupled tools that already exist or are newly developed. As a central structure for storing data and exchanging them between applications a “Common Data Model (CDM)” has been developed. Newer applications directly work upon this data structure and for this purpose use the CDM Library, a Java based framework to persist and access CDM data. However, many tools exist that are not yet based on the CDM or don’t support its data exchange format CDM XML. Data created with these tools need to be transformed properly.