Editing Interface (GNITE)
Editing Interface (GNITE)
Biology is very complex. The scale of the task to use names for indexing billions of data objects about millions of species, held in thousands of web sites and institutions can be addressed through algorithms and semanticization. Yet, there will be large numbers of exceptions that escape the rules. One solution is to complement the algorithms with an interface that allows individual taxonomists to view, explore, correct and enhance the underlying infrastructure. There are over 10,000 professional taxonomists and many times more knowledgeable enthusiasts, all of whom can find gaps, correct errors, disambiguate homonyms, and build reconciliation groups.
The editing environment builds on the taxonomic management tools that are being built within the EOL LifeDesks and EDIT ScratchPads consortium.
The editing environment will provide access to classifications that people are willing to share. They will be deposited in a classification and list repository. Users will be able to work on four aspects of the infrastructure:
- Names tools will allow names to be added, edited, deleted, or commented on. Because the interface is interconnected to the contributors to the index, the additional information can flow back to those sources who can then update their own records.
- Reconciliation tools will allow users to edit, merge, divide reconciliation groups, add new information or simply annotate names
- Annotation or flagging tools allow names, taxa, clades, or relationships between names to be annotated. A flag might say, this is a vernacular name, it is French, and even that it is used only on the Normandy coast. Other flags might indicate that a name is or is not nomenclaturally valid, or might indicate the rank of the taxon. Flags can be applied to individual names, to clades, to entire classifications, or to relationships between names (this is a junior synonym of that). If the flags are tied to accepted vocabularies of metadata then they open up the names to a wide array of semantic uses such as to discover relevant information through ephemeral computing clouds
- Classification tools will allow users to move branches within existing classification, create new branches, merge elements from more that one classification, and create new classifications. Someone trying to put together a single comprehensive list of the species in the Galapagos might be faced with one list of birds, others for insects, fish, amphibia, mammals, and the rest of the animals, one of plants, one from a research cruise, another from a social networking site, and so on. Classification tools will allow each list to be compared, all unique names to be identified and drawn together, and placed in a preferred classification scheme.
The use of the future tense indicates that this editing environment is not yet with us, but development is under way. It is expected it will speed up the process of compiling comprehensive and purposeful classifications.
No doubt Australians will refer to it as g'nite, and MAC users as iGnite.
For more information please contact David Patterson dpatterson@mbl.edu or Dmitry Mozzherin dmozzherin@eol.org