Biodiversity Data Science seeks to articulates scientific knowledge about living organisms into a growing cyberinfrastructure for the use of scientific and general audiences. Complex data- and work-flows connect the knowledge providers (taxonomic experts and academic institutions) with end users (broad scientific community, goverment audiences) through aggregators and mediators (data providers, scientific journals).
Solutions that rely only on taxonomic names can not account for changes in scientific meanings, and might cause incorrect data packaging, wrong interpretations and mislead decision-making. To overcome this limitation, taxonomic intelligence provide mapping between names and meaning by using taxonomic concepts and reasoning.
This collection includes prominent publications that discuss conceptual and practical challenges of the application of taxonomic names, concepts and reasoning in the growing global biodiversity cyberinfrastructure. Recommendations and corrections are welcome.
Main image credit: | Representation of the relationship between nomenclature, taxonomy and type specimens. Taken from "What is the difference between nomenclature and taxonomy?" International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. |
Background image credit: | Southeast Asian butterflies from Wallace’s personal insect collection. Displayed in the Natural History Museum of London. Photograph by JR Ferrer-Paris. |
ScienceOpen disciplines: | Entomology, Plant science & Botany, Paleontology, Animal science & Zoology, Molecular biology, Life sciences |
Keywords: | taxon concept alignment, taxonomic reasoning, taxonomic nomenclature, systematics, Biodiversity informatics, semantic web, taxonomic cyberinfrastructure |
DOI: | 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-LIFE.CLJUS9H.v1 |