Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics

Symposium: Key Innovations in Biodiversity Informatics

The MoReTax project: Modelling rule-based functions for an information system using taxonomic concepts to link factual data
Walter Berendsohn and Marc Geoffroy
Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum (BGBM) Berlin-Dahlem, Koenigin-Luise-Str. 6-8, D-14191 Berlin, Germany

In order to secure information quality when organism-referred data is represented and searched for in databases, the data must be assigned to a unique class of reference objects (taxon; e.g. botanical or zoological species) and this assignment must be stored permanently. Today, most databases try to achieve this by using the scientific name (e.g. species name). However, the same organism can be assigned to different names, on the one hand because of problems with the designation of the taxon itself (nomenclatural synonymy) and on the other hand because of different taxonomical and systematical concepts, which derive from different contemporaneous scientific views (interpretations) or from an evolution of the concept (new knowledge). Different concepts ("potential taxa") can lead to different circumscriptions and therefore to different demarcations between taxa, to different classifications in the hierarchical system of ranks and to different overall classification systems.

The amount of the uncertainties caused by the use of names as an index system depends on the quantity of different aggregate sources of information, and concerns presumably less than half of all taxa. Nevertheless, these uncertainties must be taken in account when information systems deal with organism-referred data. The MoReTax project (http://www.bgbm.org/biodivinf/projects/moretax/) -funded by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation- aims to contribute to the solution of this problem. Different taxonomic concepts and their relationships build a directed graph. A set of rules concerning this graph allows calculating a "generalized" relationship between any two taxonomic concepts. On the basis of different categories of applicability of factual information it is then possible to infer the applicability of transmitted factual information. The BGBM Model (http://www.bgbm.org/biodivinf/docs/bgbm-model/) can be used to store taxonomic concepts and their relationships. An extension of this model (the Configuration Module) has been conceived in order to tune some of the rules.

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