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]
The NCBI taxonomy database contains the names of all organisms that are represented in the genetic databases with at least one nucleotide or protein sequence. Click on the tree if you want to browse the taxonomic structure or retrieve sequence data for a particular group of organisms." (...) "The NCBI taxonomy database is not a primary source for taxonomic or phylogenetic information. Furthermore, the database does not follow a single taxonomic treatise but rather attempts to incorporate phylogenetic and taxonomic knowledge from a variety of sources, including the published literature, web-based databases, and the advice of sequence submitters and outside taxonomy experts. Consequently, the NCBI taxonomy database is not a phylogenetic or taxonomic authority and should not be cited as such. ... [Information of the supplier]
This site merges the book A Guide to Field Guides: Identifying the Natural History of North America by Diane Schmidt, Biology Librarian at the University of Illinois, and its companion Web site International Field Guides. After the publisher returned copyright to the book, the author decided to combine the two products and create a searchable database of field guides for plants, animals, and other objects in North America and around the world. Except where noted, all guides listed here were personally examined by the author. As used in this site, a field guide is a small, lightweight book used to identify plants, animals, or other objects. It is designed to be used outdoors and usually contains many illustrations, whether drawings or photographs, and limited text. Generally speaking, field guides are used by amateurs, hence the emphasis on visual identification. There are a number of different technical manuals, atlases, floras and faunas, handbooks, and keys for the use of professionals which are not listed here. ... [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]
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]
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]
BioPortal is a Web-based application for accessing and sharing ontologies. BioPortal provides functionality to browse and search across all ontologies, supports views/slims/value sets and mappings between ontologies. [Information of the supplier]
If two different species, genera or other taxons have the same name, this name is a homonym. Homonyms are illegal if they belong to the same code of nomenclature. If same name belongs to different codes, it is a hemihomonym (Starobogatov, 1991). Despite of their validity, hemihomonyms are misleading and even dangerous. If there is a possibility that a name is a hemihomonym, use postfix (b), (c) or (z) for names covered by Botanical, Bacteriological, or Zoological codes of nomenclature, respectively. To check if name is a hemihomonym, please use table below or the query with this search API prototype. ... [Information of the supplier]
BioConcepts is a multilingual database which documents the origin and definition of basic biological concepts. It serves as a guide to the first uses of words, influential definitions and shifts of meaning through history. The database started life in 2008 as a supplement to the handbook Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (HWB) which was published in three volumes by Verlag J.B. Metzler in 2011. BioConcepts is focused on terms of general biology, i.e. those concepts which apply to all living beings (e.g. ‘organism’, ‘evolution’, or ‘gene’); terms related to particular forms of life (e.g. ‘flower’, ‘heart’, or ‘seeing’) are for the most part not included (the exceptions to this rule refer to important concepts for wide spread phenomena like ‘sexuality’, ‘social behaviour’, or ‘symbiosis’). Currently, the database comprises approximately 8,000 quotations in about 2,000 main entries. In order to find the oldest occurrences of the words the huge corpora of digitalized texts (e.g. JSTOR or GoogleBooks) have been systematically searched. As many of the quotations have been included by students and are not yet checked and revised there are still inconsistencies and incomplete quotations in the database. They will be removed in the process of revision that is currently taking place. By mid-2015 the revision should be completed (by December 2014 entries in the categories ranging from "adaptation" to "regeneration" have been revised). You may help to improve the database by including quotations or hints to quotations in the section “Your feedback” at the end of each entry. ... [Information of the supplier]
