This glossary has been developed to help botanists who are not fluent in Chinese, but have a sincere desire and patient determination to translate descriptions in whole or in part. It may also be useful for Chinese botanists searching for equivalent English terms. Begun in the autumn of 1980, the project was my sanctuary while teaching English at the South China Agricultural College outside of Guangzhou in the People’s Republic of China. Hu Shiu-Ying, Research Botanist at the Arnold Arboretum, invited me to accompany her to China and indulge my fledgling interests in pharmacognosy. I planned to stay only a few weeks and return home. When my travel visas, then required for every city, became difficult for our hosts to obtain, I opted to return to Guangzhou and help Dr. Hu’s school friend, Florence Lee. She needed a native English speaker to lecture in their language program until the American ESL teachers arrived. Their visas were never approved and I finished teaching the six-month course. What I lacked in experience and training, the students provided in enthusiasm and curiosity. The students, in fact, were mature scholars from various disciplines of agriculture who were earnestly preparing for fellowships abroad. This unbelievably dedicated group of about eighty men and women from all parts of China had survived the Cultural Revolution and the political devastation that uprooted their education, careers, personal lives, and national heritage. While the trial proceeded for the deposed leaders known as The Gang of Four, I tried to define the cultural differences between our countries to prepare the students for an academic environment outside of China. In turn, they taught me simplicity, collaboration, and the intrinsic beauty of the Chinese characters. ... [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]
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]
GONUTS is a Gene Ontology Normal Usage Tracking System. The GONUTS wiki has been set up to provide third-party documentation for users of the Gene Ontology Project. The GO wiki is not an official product of the GO consortium. It was built by users at TAMU for newcomers to GO who want to explore GO usage. The rationale for this wiki is described in "About GONUTS". To enter the ontology pages, go to the GO page, or search for a term. For more information about how this wiki is automatically updated, see GO wiki scripts. For Help using the system, see Help: Contents, which is available in the navigation links from all pages. See Current events for what's new with the GONUTS wiki. Leave comments and suggestions on our Known Issues page. ... [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 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 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine and used for indexing, cataloging, and searching for biomedical and health-related information and documents. 2014 MeSH includes the subject descriptors appearing in MEDLINE®/PubMed®, the NLM catalog database, and other NLM databases. Many synonyms, near-synonyms, and closely related concepts are included as entry terms to help users find the most relevant MeSH descriptor for the concept they are seeking. In NLM's online databases, many terms entered by searchers are automatically mapped to MeSH descriptors to facilitate retrieval of relevant information. Various online systems provide access to MeSH and the vocabulary is available in several online systems. These include the MeSH Browser, containing the complete contents of the vocabulary; the MeSH Entrez databases, which are designed to assist those searching MEDLINE/PubMed; and the UMLS Metathesaurus with links to many other controlled vocabularies. ... [Information of the supplier]
The goal of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is to support biomedical researchers in their knowledge-intensive work, by providing online tools and a Web portal enabling them to access, review, and integrate disparate ontological resources in all aspects of biomedical investigation and clinical practice. A major focus of our work involves the use of biomedical ontologies to aid in the management and analysis of data derived from complex experiments. ... [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 objective of the working group is to foster accessibility of existing and emerging biological collection data banks at the international level by developing proposals for data and metadata standards. The groups long-term objectives:a) Foment standardization of the terminology used to model biological collection information, b) Collect and make public documents providing standards used in - or of potential use for - biological collections and c) Contribute to a general format for data exchange and retrieval for biological collections. ... [Information of the supplier]
