Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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The EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy as an information broker in name infrastructures
Andreas Kohlbecker, Yde de Jong, Cherian Mathew, Lorna Morris, Andreas Müller, Anton Güntsch, Walter Berendsohn

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-31 11:15 AM – 11:30 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-07

Abstract


Biodiversity informatics faces an increasing need for integrating information from different sources, software applications, and services for analysis, visualization and publication. Sharing of data is essential to facilitate the collaboration and large-scale analysis needed for a successful treatment of the pressing issues connected with biodiversity. Software systems are therefore needed which are able to act as information brokers mediating information between multiple data standards and protocols.

The EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy) Platform for Cybertaxonomy, henceforth called “EDIT Platform”, is such an information broker which is facilitating essential information flows needed for comprehensive data exchange, data indexing, web-publication, and versioning. It benefits from extensible and flexible data import and export facilities which are supporting important TDWG standards and quasi standards and also offers REST (Representational State Transfer) services which enable the EDIT Platform to play a key role in e-Science workflows by providing taxonomic information and names as scientific backbones for these processes.

This flexibility allows the EDIT Platform to support various international projects in which it plays different roles depending on the specific requirements and tasks to fulfil.

In the ViBRANT project it acts as a gateway integrating data between the different platforms and heterogenic sources and also acts as a full text index for taxonomic names.

For PESI, the Pan-European Species directories Infrastructure, it taxonomically integrates and secures the main pan-European species checklists: Fauna Europaea (FaEu), the Euro+Med plantbase (E+M), the European Register of Marine Species (ERMS), and the Index Fungorum. With more than 200,000 species, together they provide the largest and most comprehensive regional species inventory in the world.

In i4Life and BioVeL it integrates the full Catalogue of Life (CoL) and makes its content available for e-Science applications. With its web based services it is supporting advanced workflow management systems as Taverna and Kepler and with its fuzzy searching capabilities it leverages fast and easy name finding and matching for such service-driven processes and for name infrastructures in general.