Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Plinian Core: integrating information about species
Santiago Martínez de la Riva, Carmen Quesada, Francisco Pando de la Hoz, Bárbara Ayala-Orozco, Ángela M. Suárez-Mayorga, María Mora, Danny Vélez, Jose Trinidad Mendoza Gaytan, Daniel Lins da Silva, Patricia Koleff, Maria Esther Quintero Rivero, Aurelio Sanabria

Building: Main Building 1st Floor
Room: Salone degli Oceani
Last modified: 2013-10-07

Abstract


Plinian Core is a draft standard for sharing information at the species level. It was conceived to solve how to represent "species information" for its electronic dissemination, exchange and integration, including controlled vocabularies. By "species information" we refer to all kinds of properties or traits related to taxa (of any rank), including those associated with species descriptions, nomenclatural, conservation, management, and demographic information, as well as related resources. In this regard, the group's interests go beyond strictly taxonomic descriptions. The objective of this work is to present the process and advances of the development (Plinian Core v3.1) and implementation (Application Profiles) of Plinian Core.

The initial activity of the project consisted of reviewing the existing standards associated with species information, which had been published on the Internet. The evaluation demonstrated the necessity of developing a standard that allows the automated integration, recovery and exchange of species information from heterogeneous databases. The development of the standard has been leaded by the National Institute of Biodiversity (INbio, Costa Rica), GBIF-ES (Spain), University of Granada (Spain), Humboldt Institute (Colombia), Conabio (Mexico), University of Sao Paulo (Brazil).

The general principles of the standard design were that it should not be intimidating, but be able to work on its own, represent all the information contained in the related projects, and be expanded and able to be integrated. As a result of the recent advances, the actual hierarchical schema allows developing species data sheets that can be shown in websites. It is structured in 18 classes composed for numerous elements. Currently, as part of the documentation, there is an Abstract Model: (https://purl.org/pliniancore/am_v3.1) and an Application profile (http://purl.org/pliniancore/ap_v3.1). You can see  more documentation about Plinian Core in https://code.google.com/p/pliniancore/.

As far as we know, Plinian Core is being used or developed by projects and institutions of Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Spain. We aim to make Plinian Core a truly global standard by bringing together teams and institutions all over the world under the umbrella of TDWG.