Ve Heft 39: MoReTax - Handling Factual Information Linked to Taxonomic Concepts in Biology

Information about plant or animal species is usually linked to scientific names of organisms, which also provide the main key for information retrieval. Each name labels the taxonomic concept of the author who created or uses it. The taxonomic concepts used by authors are often congruent, but may as well be overlapping. The same concept may be labelled by different names, or a single name may be applied to different concepts. Existing information systems present the relations of synonyms to accepted names, usually implying a single taxonomic concept. Over the last years first steps have been taken to model information systems that explicitly store and use taxonomic concepts and describe their relationships by a standard set of operators.

The present publication delivers the results of a research project funded by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) and carried out at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM). The following results are presented:

- the "Berlin Taxonomic Information Model" for the handling of taxonomic concepts,

- the functional description of a general editing tool for a taxonomical backbone based on the "Berlin Model" and the software implementation steps taken in the European "euro+med plantbase" project , and

- the logical and functional basics of a rule based "transmission engine" for factual information when merging data explicitly linked to taxonomic concepts.

With this publication the prerequisites are met for a new generation of taxonomic reference systems which will satisfy the increasing demand for handling taxon-related information in interoperable information systems.