For over 250 years, scientific names have been used to refer to organisms. Our literature, museums, herbaria, and databases rely so heavily on names, that an infrastructure that manages (the strings that serve as) names can discover, index, organize and interconnect on-line information about organisms and serve the needs of biologists. That is the vision for the Global Names Architecture (GNA).
has announced its Phylogenetic Tree Challenge. Global Names is pleased to make its PostBox available for submission of entries.
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Ryan Schenk's award winning Synynymy visualization. It graphs the changing frequency of different synonyms for species across the years; it calls on names information from the Encyclopedia of Life and the literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This example shows the changing use of Bison bison and Bos bison. It is at http://synynyms.no.de. Google's NGRAM viewer gives results on names without knowledge of synonyms. This tool can work on any taxon known to EOL by visiting the EOL taxon page, picking up the taxon ID and putting it into this URL - http://synynyms.no.de/taxon/11699 (this example is for Gymnodinium). |
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Rod Page's iTaxon service. This is a persuasive demonstration of the capacity of informatics to provide a service to taxonomists: Give me a name, I'll give you the descriptions from the literature. Nearly 250,000 names are linked to some form of digital identifier, and many of those are connected through the identifier to an accessible pdf. An operation of this scale is made possible through the use of names and DOIs as common denominators to link distributed data. It is at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon. |
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Pete DeVries' exploration of the semantic web dimensions of biodiversity, showing how he calls on the world of linked open data to build up knowledge about our biodiversity. His aim is to create linked open data (LOD) identifiers for species concepts, link those concepts to names within the Global Names Architecture, and to investigate how LOD methods may be used to match specimens and related data to the concepts. It is at http://www.taxonconcept.org/. |
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The EOL NameLink service developed by Patrick Leary scrutinizes pages for any reference to a name, and then pops in a hyperlink so that the name can now point to the appropriate entry in EOL. Such a system can be customised to point to other websites. It is a simple idea, elegantly executed, and with much potential. It is at http://eol.org/info/namelink. The first element of the GlobalNames version of this service is available from here. |
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The iPlant Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS) is a service that receives taxonomic names, and reports back the best name according to an authoritative source, in this case TROPICOS. The ability to 'reconcile' alternative names for the same species and return a preferred name can 'normalize' taxonomy in biodiversity databases that currently use different names. This is an essential pre-requisite for bringing together distributed biodiversity data. It is at http://tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org/. |