Rationale

Why build a GNA?

GNA started about 10 years ago in the efforts of several groups  to assemble web sites that managed aspects of the names of organisms. Some taxonomists wanted to accelerate and improve the quality of descriptions of taxa, or produce a catalog of the known global biodiversity, while nomenclators were transferring the formal lists of accepted names to the internet, and yet others explored the use of names for indexing information on line. The overlap of these activities and their common interests in names was the seed for an open, shared, names-based cyberinfrastructure - GNA.

GNA is emerging at a time when there is an expectation that informatics will lead to a 'New Biology'. An increased advantage to sharing data will lead to a data commons, around which a semanticized environment will emerge with various players gathering, indexing, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing the names and associated information. 

A names infrastructure will draw together biological information to create a more interconnected body of knowledge. Not only will this increase our capacity to deal with big and urgent questions, but it will be a change to the way we do biology.  Biology is the very complex of an evolutionary process that has meandered through space and time from its beginnings about 3 billion years ago. The result is a biology in which the character of the taxa, numbers of individuals, distributions, and existence of species is forever changing. To understand it fully we have to embrace evolutionary processes that endure for billions of years and molecular events that are completed in milliseconds.  We need to understand phenomena that are expressed on spatial scales that range from the nanometer to tens of thousands of kilometers.  Our desire is to understand both the big picture and the finest detail of its causes.

The deciphering of the genetic code as part of human understanding and as a means of how cells work has provided a unifying theme to biology, as have the evolutionary processes. Despite them, biology lacks firm rules that can be used to predict patterns in this complexity.  Biologists have achieved insights from describing small fragments of this complexity. Biology has by necessity been much shaped by the insights of individuals.  This 'narrative' understanding of biology is fragmented in which the exceptions, such as the reversal of aging in some jellyfish such as Turritopsis (right), are overwhelming.  The vision of 'New Biology' is that we will add new devices to manage much larger bodies of information, be able to answer much bigger questions, and have new visualization tools that will help us to see the big picture. Biology can then join the other 'big sciences'.

GNA offers a key part of the infrastructure where names and hierarchies are used to index and organize information, and to provide the foundations of a very rich system of data-linking for Biology