The i4Life Project (Indexing for Life) is to create a Virtual Research Community that will develop and harmonise the various species catalogues used by six of the world’s global biodiversity programmes using the Catalogue of Life as a yardstick. One of the great issues in biodiversity science is how to synthesize a comprehensive view of the entire biodiversity to better understand how it functions, and to model and forecast how it will respond to major anthropogenic pressures. Harmonising the differing catalogues of species is a crucial part of this synthesis and has enormous practical significance in indexing the knowledge needed to protect biodiversity. Six ‘global biodiversity programmes’, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the European Nucleotide Archive (part of INSDC), the Barcode of Life initiatives, the IUCN Red List, the new LifeWatch programme, and the Encyclopedia of Life, join in this project with the Catalogue of Life to initiate this harmonisation and to explore the full extent of species surveyed in the different programmes. The target is to enable each programme to enhance its catalogue with the assistance of the others, and to create a harmonised list for the entire set of organisms. ... [Information of the supplier]
BioSyst.EU represents European scientists dealing with topics of systematic biology. It considers itself as a collaborative counterpart to the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) where European Natural History Institutions have joined, whereas in BioSyst.EU individual scientists are to be represented via their national or regional societies. BioSyst.EU aims to provide a European platform to: a) hold joint meetings on a regular basis; b) promote research, teaching, and training in all areas of systematic biology, including phylogenetic, taxonomic, and biodiversity research; c) encourage collaboration and interchange among researchers, both individually and through their respective societies and institutions; d) coordinate national and international efforts without infringing on the autonomy of the member societies; e) encourage formation of additional national systematic societies, while continuing to represent systematists in countries still lacking formal societies and f) increase the profile and funding of systematic biology in the European parliament. ... [Information of the supplier]
ViBRANT recognised the need for a bibliography of life, i.e. a freely accessible bibliography of every taxonomic paper ever published. None of the currently available aggregators were satisfactory, so we have chosen to extend the Plazi bibliographic tool, RefBank. There are two primary reasons for this choice, first the original developer, Guido Sautter, is a partner in ViBRANT and second, RefBank contains a parsing tool that will turn Rod Page's "cryptic text strings" into structured references that can be easily transformed into any of the other conventional forms (see the Data Format Report). The bulk of RefBank's growth to date has come from ViBRANT contributed references, with 80,000 references being accumulated in the first six months of operation and another 85,000 references in the second six months. Work continues within ViBRANT to extract bibliographies from published works and parse them to generate more references. This work is to ensure that RefBank is seeded with sufficient references at launch so as to engage users. There was a significant development for RefBank in Autumn 2012 when it was the subject of a presentation and demonstration at TDWG 2013. Since when we have seen the addition of community contributed references. A more formal launch of RefBank, probably in conjunction with related ViBRANT developed tools, is planned for Summer/Autumn 2013. (http://vbrant.eu/content/communal-literature) ... [Miscellaneous as indicated]
Biodiversity information constitutes an important source of knowledge for many disciplines. For example, it is fundamental to supporting conservation and for understanding the potential impacts of climate change. External and internal factors call for an urgent modernization of the production and accessibility of these data, information and knowledge. These external factors include the need for biodiversity data to support decisions for regional and taxon focused conservation. Internal factors are a consequence of the opportunities of the digital revolution, and the need to reconcile the escalating volume of data with the requirement to curate it by a fixed number of taxonomists. The pro-iBiosphere project has been launched for a period of two years (September 1st, 2012 to August 31st, 2014), with the goal of addressing technical and semantic interoperability challenges and preparing the ground for the creation of a system for intelligent management of biodiversity knowledge which will improve the present system of taxonomic literature. ... [Information of the supplier]
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over a network. The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically Web Services Description Language, known by the acronym WSDL). The two mains protocols used by webservices are SOAP (the standard) and REST (based on http). Ikey+ provides a service that generate single-access keys on demand using descriptive data contained in a SDD formatted file. See the poster for more details. ... [Information of the supplier]
The RWC is an open access knowledge base of global scope that offers access to rotifer nomenclature, taxonomy and classification, natural history collections, geographic distribution, environmental data, and bibliography for all currently accepted species-, genus- and family-group names in Phylum Rotifera. It serves as an authoritative source for all 4200+ nominal taxa of genus rank and below, that were named since the start of zoological nomenclature in 1758. It also provides a consistent framework for taxonomic data management; allowing collecting, integrating and arranging of complex future data and knowledge about the group. ... [Information of the supplier]
The pro-iBiosphere Final Event is organised by Sigma Orionis and Agentschap Plententuin Meise (Botanic Garden Meise) in collaboration with the pro-iBiosphere consortium. The purpose of the event is to present the achievements of the pro-iBiosphere project in a series of activities. The Final Event will consist of a series of activities including workshops, training, demonstrations, poster session, conference. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
This site brings together the past editions of the botanical Code, presented as web-files, hyperlinked horizontally and vertically. By now, there is over a century worth of editions of the botanical Code. Since mid-2011 it is named the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, but it is best known as the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN), a name it has borne from the 1950, Stockholm Congress to the 2011, Melbourne Congress. The history of the Code that governs scientific names of algae, fungi, and plants (traditionally named the botanical Code) may be taken to have started in 1867, although nomenclature itself obviously is considerably older. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Danish Taxonomic Facility (DK-TAF) is a large infrastructure consisting of collections, expertise and equipment for the advanced study of biosystematics/taxonomy and earth sciences. The collections of DK-TAF are, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, in an international top class. They comprise a total of about 20 million specimens of preserved animals, preserved human remains, preserved and living plants, tissues, fossils, minerals and rocks. ... [Information of the supplier]
SALVIAS TaxonScrubber is a stand-alone application for automated standardization of taxonomic names. In addition to removing spelling errors in species names, TaxonScrubber splits concatenated information into separate fields, and can be used to restructure flat-file specimen data prior to importing to a relational database. Although designed primarily for standardizing inventory data for the SALVIAS plots database, TaxonScrubber can be used whenever large numbers of taxonomic records need to be error-checked and reformated. ... [Information of the supplier]