63urn:lsid:arphahub.com:pub:0E0032F4-55AE-5263-8B3C-F4DD637C30C2Biodiversity Information Science and StandardsBISS2535-0897Pensoft Publishers10.3897/biss.5.756417564117785Conference AbstractSYM18 - Discovering known biodiversity: Digital accessible knowledge Synospecies, an application to reflect changes in taxonomic names based on a triple store based on taxonomic data liberated from publication GmürRetoreto@factsmission.com1AgostiDonathttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9286-120022Factsmission, Biel, SwitzerlandFactsmissionBielSwitzerlandPlazi, Bern, SwitzerlandPlaziBernSwitzerland
2021230920215e75641FFAC8987-B790-5BA5-BCD8-41F8CA847C6222092021Reto Gmür, Donat AgostiThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Taxonomic treatments, sections of publications documenting the features or distribution of a related group of organisms (called a “taxon”, plural “taxa”) in ways adhering to highly formalized conventions, and published in scientific journals, shape our understanding of global biodiversity (Catapano 2019).
Treatments are the building blocks of the evolving scientific consensus on taxonomic entities. The semantics of these treatments and their relationships are highly structured: taxa are introduced, merged, made obsolete, split, renamed, associated with specimens and so on. Plazi makes this content available in machine-readable form using Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is the standard model for Linked Data and the Semantic Web. RDF can be exchanged in different formats (aka concrete syntaxes) such as RDF/XML or Turtle. The data model describes graph structures and relies on Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs), ontologies such as Darwin Core basic vocabulary are used to assign meaning to the identifiers. For Synospecies, we unite all treatments into one large knowledge graph, modelling taxonomic knowledge and its evolution with complete references to quotable treatments. However, this knowledge graph expresses much more than any individual treatment could convey because every referenced entity is linked to every other relevant treatment. On synospecies.plazi.org, we provide a user-friendly interface to find the names and treatments related to a taxon. An advanced mode allows execution of queries using the SPARQL query language.
The Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) project receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action under grant agreement No 101007492.
Funding program
The Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) project receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action under grant agreement No 101007492.
ReferencesCatapanoTerry2019TaxPub: An Extension of the NLM/NCBI Journal Publishing DTD for Taxonomic Descriptions10.5281/zenodo.3484285