Dear Tony,

Yes, in many ways we are close, we just haven't put the bits together in one highly visible place that people can use.

I used to run the "Taxonomic Search Engine" described in http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-6-48 , which was an example of a federated search engine that queried multiple sources on the fly (a bit like http://botany.si.edu/ing/ but I used web services and extracted and reformatted the data rather than show results as web pages inside frames).

The two biggest problems were the source services going offline, or changing their web services (breaking my code). There also performance issues when doing "live" searching as opposed to searching a local list. You've covered all these issues nicely. There's also the problem of redundancy. Because some lists are aggregations of other lists, we can end up with the same source being represented several times in the results, but without the user being aware of this.

I just think there's clearly scope for bringing these sorts of services together in one place and providing people with some tools to address the problems they face, rather than the chaotic landscape we present at the moment.

Regards

Rod

On 16 Feb 2012, at 03:19, <Tony...@csiro.au> <Tony...@csiro.au> wrote:

http://pgrdoc.bioversity.cgiar.org/taxcheck/ (the granddaddy of such systems), operating over the GRIN database for higher plants

over many/most genus namesplus species names from catalogue of Life in the main, and more recently

http://biodiversity.org.au/service/taxamatch (working over different master lists as their reference database) as mentioned by Greg; plus no doubt others I have not mentioned.

not a problem. The residual problem is the construction of the (actual or virtual) "master list". An example of a virtual "master list" (for plants, at genus level only) is provided by the Index Nominum Genericorum (ING) portal at http://botany.si.edu/ing/ : entering a query in the first text box does a real time distributed search of designated resources which between them provide a (partly overlapping) coverage of most/all plant genus names, comprising ING itself, IPNI, Index Nominum Algarum, TROPICOS, and Index Fungorum in this instance (however without any fuzzy match function). This is one approach; benefits are the removal of the need for one site to hold all the names to search over, plus the removal of any synchronization issues between a remote "point of truth" for the records and a central cache of the data. Downsides are the fact that deduplication/data harmonization of potential duplicates from multiple sources is not done; multiple taxonomic concepts/hierarchies may be in use at the various providers; it is difficult to provide fuzzy search over remotely hosted data; plus if any provider is off line at time of query, their data are not searched.

or exported, then cached centrally for the search process. This also provides the option for additional QA / data deduplication and harmonization and also notionally improved performance (provided that sufficient resources can be thrown at the one machine where the searches execute in real time). Disadvantages then include the need for continuous assembly and reassembly of the aggregate dataset, and the possibility of the central "view" of the data being out-of-synch with the latest changes at the provider; but something which can be managed in the main (as is already done my many similar "aggregators" of species distribution records).

cases, whose content is the most up-to-date / complete / authoritative / accepted in case of potential multiple sources; plus of course, filling gaps where currently there is no obvious source of content for a particular group or region. These are questions which concern key projects at the present time, exemplified by the Catalogue of Life partnership (Sp2000 plus ITIS) for extant data, other sources for data on fossils, and the "Global Names" partnership, to name a few. Others more qualified than myself can answer this question and look at associated issues of resourcing, persistence, data completeness, data sharing culture and the like but at least what we have is a start...

above, for Europaean species, PESI http://www.eu-nomen.eu/portal/, and so on

(in my case, definitely not...) however they are not only pointers along the road but useable resources today.

up-to-date, continuously improve the quality and completeness of the accessible data... But it does require a "client focus" which provides strong directions for the types of services to be provide, and their actual useability when accessed. (Who has the mandate / who pays are different issues of course).

just show that it is not all gloom and doom. And this is not to mention the myriad (and often excellent) taxon-specific database projects out there, of which Paul Kirk and Chris Thompson have already mentioned shining examples, to name but two... - most of which are already engaged in either Sp2000, Global Names Architecture, or both.

--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.p...@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodp...@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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