The Environment Ontology (EnvO) provides a controlled, structured vocabulary that is designed to support the annotation of any organism or biological sample with environment descriptors. EnvO contains terms for biomes, environmental features, and environmental material. Examples of biome terms are: boreal moist forest biome, tropical rain forest biome, and oceanic pelagic zone biome. Examples of environmental feature terms are: mountain, pond, whale fall, and karst. Examples of environmental material terms are: sediment, soil, water, and air These three sets of terms enable a concise, standardised, and comprehensive description of environment that is key to the integration, archiving and federated searching of environmental data. As a tool for the life sciences, we see EnvO bringing similar benefits to the Gene Ontology (GO). Through promoting consistent annotation grounded in an ontological framework, we hope to facilitate the semantic retrieval of any biological record anchored to EnvO. Records contained in sequence databases, omic data repositories, tissue banks and museum collections are prime candidates for EnvO annotation.However, EnvO is also suitable for the annotation of any record that has an environmental component. For example, you can use EnvO terms to provide information on the environment of remote sensing devices or simply to tag a picture that you took at the weekend. Further, the EnvO project is closely tied with GAZ, a first step towards an open source gazetteer constructed on ontological principles. GAZ describes places and place names as well as the relations between them and, when linked with EnvO descriptors, provides a basis to infer environment from place names. ... [Information of the supplier]
uBio is an initiative within the science library community to join international efforts to create and utilize a comprehensive and collaborative catalog of names of all living (and once-living) organisms. The Taxonomic Name Server (TNS) catalogs names and classifications to enable tools that can help users find information on living things using any of the names that may be related to an organism. (...) uBio provides access to the Taxonomic Name Service via SOAP. SOAP allows users to access uBio data as if it were a local resource. For example, a library may have a database of fish pictures it serves. Users may query by name to find pictures. The developer of this system could use NameBank to access additional names that can be used to ensure than name queries find the pictures even if the name wasn't originally attached to the picture. ... [Information of the supplier]
GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, has been developed as an indexing, retrieval and control tool for the European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), Copenhagen. The work has been carried out through a contract between the EEA and the ETC/CDS which is led by the Ministry of the Environment of Lower Saxony, includes members of Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden and benefits of the collaboration of other member countries of the European Union (EU), as well as of UNEP Infoterra. The basic idea for the development of GEMET was to use the best of the presently available excellent multilingual thesauri, in order to save time, energy and funds. GEMET was conceived as a "general" thesaurus, aimed to define a common general language, a core of general terminology for the environment. Specific thesauri and descriptor systems (e.g. on Nature Conservation, on Wastes, on Energy, etc.) have been excluded from the first step of development of the thesaurus and have been taken into account only for their structure and upper level terminology. The resulting 6.562 terms have been arranged in a classification scheme made of 3 super-groups, 30 groups plus 5 accessory, instrumental groups. Each descriptor has been arranged in a hierarchical structure headed by a Top Term. The level of poly-hierarchy, i.e. the allocation of a descriptor to more than one group, has been kept to a minimum. Further, to allow a thematic retrieval of terms thematically related but scattered in different groups, a set of 40 themes have been agreed upon with the EEA and each descriptor has been assigned to as many themes as necessary. Thus, the user can access the thesaurus through the group-hierarchical list, through the thematic list or through the alphabetical list. GEMET follows the ISO norms on monolingual and multilingual thesauri. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Semantic Network Service (SNS) of the Federal Environment Agency provides support for all questions concerning environmental terms including the common place names. SNS contains a bi-lingual (German/English) semantic network which consists of three components.: (1) the Environmental Thesaurus UmThes® with its 33,759 inter-networked terms. UmThes® also is the German source of the European GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) (19 languages); (2) the Geo-Thesaurus-Environment (GTU) with 18,931 geographic names and the spatial intersections of all these places; (3) an Environmental Chronology of current or historical events that affected the environment. ... [Information of the supplier]
The 1994 CBE (Council of Biology Editors) manual, Scientific Style and Format, describes two systems of documentation, the citation-sequence system and the name-year system. This handout provides guidelines for each system. (For a class paper, check to see if your instructor prefers one of these systems or another. For a journal article, check the journal's instructions to authors to find out which system to use.) The CBE manual specifies that journal titles should be abbreviated, and it provides rules for abbreviation and a list of standard abbreviations of words commonly used in titles. Although this handout focuses on documentation style, you should be aware that the manual also contains information on many other aspects of scientific style, from prose style to handling of numbers, tables and figures, and conventions in a variety of scientific areas. ... [Information of the supplier]
Plazi is an association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. To this end Plazi will: (1) Maintain a digital taxonomic literature repository to enable archiving of taxonomic treatments. (2) Enhance submitted taxonomic treatments by creating taxonx XML versions. (3) Participate in the development of new models for publishing taxonomic treatments in order to maximize interoperability with other relevant cyberinfrastructure components (e.g., name servers, biodiversity resources, etc...). (4) Advocate and educate about the vital importance of maintaining free and open access to scientific discourse and data. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Global Names Index is the first component of a semantic environment for biology called the Global Names Architecture GNA). GNI has been developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Encyclopedia of Life. It has benefited from the ideas of an array of gifted and enthusiastic individuals who contributed through the Nomina workshops that they attended. GNI was developed because of the central importance of the names of organisms in the management of data about organisms. The primary users of this site are not people, but other machines, so please don’t complain because the site is boring. ... [Information of the supplier]
STERNA (Semantic Web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application) is the contribution of twelve European natural history museums and other institutions that collect and hold content on biodiversity, wildlife and nature in general, to the objectives and realisation of a European Digital Library. The project specifically addresses the many small cultural heritage institutions and content providers that want to actively participate and contribute to the European Digital Library initiative but lack both technical skills and financial resources to do so. To help content providers to make their valuable and rich resources available to a wider audience, our vision is to create a dispersed and networked information space, supported and sustained by a member network of autonomous content organisations which serves users with a special interest in nature and wildlife worldwide. The STERNA project is supported and partly funded by the eContentplus programme of the European Commission. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Global Names Architecture (GNA) is a system of databases, programs, and web services - a cyberinfrastructure - that can be used to discover, index, organize and interconnect on-line information about organisms and their names. When a thing has a name, that name becomes an anchor around which we can collect our observations and knowledge. The use of names as a framework for knowledge of biology began with the system of scientific names introduced by Linnaeus about 250 years ago. His approach was to use latin binomials, such as Ba humbugi (it's a snail), Pompholyxophrys punicea (a microbe) or Homo sapiens (a self-aware biped). This system is still used for almost all organisms. Names are included in almost every statement and database about organisms. In the e-world, names are metadata which can be used to discover and organize information about organisms. The Global Names Architecture is a communal open environment that manages names so that we can manage information about organisms and serve the needs of biologists. ... [Information of the supplier]
The OBO Foundry is a collaborative experiment involving developers of science-based ontologies who are establishing a set of principles for ontology development with the goal of creating a suite of orthogonal interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. The groups developing ontologies who have expressed an interest in this goal are listed below, followed by other relevant efforts in this domain. In addition to a listing of OBO ontologies, this site also provides a statement of the OBO Foundry principles, discussion fora, technical infrastructure, and other services to facilitate ontology development. ... [Information of the supplier]
