Web-based taxonomy

Web-based taxonomy is the effort by taxonomists to use the World Wide Web in order to create unified, consensus taxonomies of life on Earth.

Background

In his 2002 paper on the subject,[1] H. Charles J. Godfray called for the creation of Web-based organizations to collect all the accumulated literature on a taxonomic group into a centralized knowledge base and make this data available through the Web as a unified taxonomy, so that it can be more easily examined and revised. Such a platform would be owned and maintained by a taxonomic working group, governed by an editor or an editorial board. An example of such a platform is FishBase. Many of these platforms contribute towards larger taxonomic efforts such as the Catalogue of Life (CoL), a meta-database of more than 150 species databases that catalog all living species on the planet.[2] The catalogue listed 1.64 million species for all kingdoms as of April 2016, claiming coverage of more than three quarters of the estimated species known to modern science.[3] Taxonomies like the Catalogue of Life are used by research scientists, citizen scientists, educators, and policy makers around the world.[4]

Official logo of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses

There has been some support recently for the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) to endorse the storage of virus metadata in public databases such as Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia of Life and to transcribe some of their useful data into these public databases.[5]

The notion of Web-based consensus taxonomies remains controversial because, as two Australian researchers pointed out,[6] taxonomic names are not fixed but hypotheses, and therefore in constant change.

See also

References
  1. Godfray, H.C.J (2002). Challenges for taxonomy. Nature 417: 17-19
  2. "Catalogue of Life - 2020-09-01 Beta : Source databases". www.catalogueoflife.org. Retrieved 2020-12-01.
  3. "Catalogue of Life - 2016 Annual Checklist : About the Catalogue of Life". www.catalogueoflife.org. Retrieved 2020-12-01.
  4. Harmon, Joanie (2016). ""Animal, vegetable, data: Exploring the online 'Catalogue of Life'". UCLA News Room. Retrieved 2020-12-01.
  5. Gibbs, Adrian J (2013-08-09). "Viral taxonomy needs a spring clean; its exploration era is over". Virology Journal. 10: 254. doi:10.1186/1743-422X-10-254. ISSN 1743-422X. PMC 3751428. PMID 23938184.
  6. Thiele, Kevin and David Yeates (2002). "Tension arises from duality at the heart of taxonomy". Nature. 419 (6905): 337. doi:10.1038/419337a. PMID 12353005.


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