Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Dynamics of taxon concepts: How to handle changes of taxonomic information, and why?
Oskar Kindvall

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-31 09:30 AM – 09:45 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-07

Abstract


In the scope of bioinformatics there is often a focus on retrieving data relevant for a specific taxon or a specified list of taxa. However, this is often a tricky business as the taxonomic information changes over time and different opinions on taxonomy may have been applied on different parts of the data when the records were published. Quite often taxonomic data cleaning has to be done before the analytical calculations can be conducted on a particular dataset. Is there any chance that this part of the work can omitted in the future? The answer to this is yes if we start tracking how taxon concepts change over time. This can be done by recording not only the current hierarchy of taxon concepts and their associated names and GUIDs. We also need to log information on events that lead to changes of the concepts per se and the resulting hierarchy. The important events are Lumps, Splits, Moves, Creates and Deletes. Imagine a situation where it is possible to list all relationships between taxa that have been lumped or split, and the new taxon concepts replacing them. Suppose also that both current and previous hierarchical relationships are at hand. Then it would actually be possible to retrieve the data associated to the different concepts over time without manual interpretation of taxonomic literature and data cleaning.