Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics
Flora brasiliensis Revisited
DO NAMES LEAD TO CORRECT INFORMATION?
Handling of taxonomic concepts in botanical databases
Marc Geoffroy, Anton Güntsch & Walter G. Berendsohn
Department of Biodiversity Informatics, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum
Berlin-Dahlem, Koenigin-Luise-Str. 6-8, 14191 Berlin, Germany
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Factual information linked to taxon names is an important subset of
environmental information and its relevance as a basis for political and
economical decisions is increasing. Undoubtedly, there are a great
number of taxon names that provide an excellent index to biological
results, because the concept of the taxon (and sometimes even the name
itself) is and has been the same over time. However, there are many
examples where taxonomy and nomenclature seemingly fail to deliver the
stable framework other branches of life sciences need to correlate and
synthesize their results.
The problematic relationship between taxon concepts and their naming has
been discussed before, e.g. when binomials and typification where
introduced. A modern resurrection of the problem occurred when taxonomic
databasing and attempts to link these databases revealed the inherent
inconsistencies. The problem becomes ever more prevalent because of the
rapidly increasing offer of information through global electronic
networks, where the information is linked to taxon names but the
information flow is not mediated by taxonomic experts.
The presentation attempts a quantification of the problem, a theoretical
approach of it, and an indication of how biodiversity informatics can
contribute to its solution. The quantification draws on a database of
potential taxa of German mosses (Koperski et al. 2000). The analysis
refers to the graph build on taxon concepts from disparate sources and
on their relationships, to the new relationships that arise along the
paths of such a graph and to the transmission quality of factual
information originally linked to a particular taxon concept. The general
architecture of a taxonomic information system providing mediated links
between distributed factual databases is presented as work-in-progress
(Project "A model for rule-based association of taxonomic concepts -
MoReTax" funded by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation).
Corresponding author: Marc Geoffroy, e-mail: m.geoffroy@bgbm.org
MoReTax project:
http://www.bgbm.org/BioDivInf/Projects/MoReTax/default.htm
webmaster@cria.org.br