Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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PaleoCore: An ontology and data standard for paleoanthropology
Denne Reed

Building: Main Building 1st Floor
Room: Salone degli Oceani
Last modified: 2013-09-27

Abstract


The PaleoCore initiative (http://www.paleocore.org) has the broad aim of minimizing the conceptual and technological hurdles to collaboration, data standardization and data sharing in paleoanthropology and the behavioral sciences more broadly. To meet this broad objective the project is focused on three main goals: 1) promoting data standards, 2) developing software tools to facilitate digital data collection and management, and 3) building a data portal through which researchers can query a federated network of paleoanthropological data providers. Towards this end the PaleoCore project utilizes existing data standards such as Darwin Core while simultaneously developing extensions to existing standards to meet the unique and varied needs of historical and behavioral science. In order to evaluate how the needs of paleoanthropologists coincide or diverge from what is provided by existing standards, the PaleoCore project has compiled data schemas from 15 archaeological and paleoanthropological research projects and from them distilled a provisional ontology for paleoanthropology. This presentation summarizes the structure of the ontology and offers suggestions for extending the Darwin Core data standard to better accommodate historical biodiversity and geochronology.