Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Wouter Koch (wouter.koch@artsdatabanken.no)
Received: 09 Aug 2023 | Published: 10 Aug 2023
© 2023 Wouter Koch
This 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.
Citation:
Koch W (2023) Capturing and Using Taxonomic Knowledge for Species Identification. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7: e110957. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.110957
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The skills and knowledge needed to recognize and classify taxa are becoming increasingly scarce in the scientific community, resulting in a “taxonomic impediment”, where such knowledge is gradually disappearing (
Experience working with taxonomic experts to capture taxonomic knowledge in a tabular, multiple access format has proven that important nuances in taxonomic knowledge cannot be captured in a tabular format in a practical manner. Features like taxonomic hierarchy, rich metadata, formalized geographical scope, multilingualism, numerical ranges, logical premises, and links to external services are all much needed improvements of digital identification keys. However, these are complex to capture in a tabular format, defeating the benefits of its general simplicity. To address this, we have developed Clavis, an open format for identification keys written in JavaScript Object Notation (
Having a versatile format as a foundation, a crucial next step was to offer experts a tool to edit and test identification keys, and provide end-users with a tool to access this information. In this presentation, we show the Clavis format itself, as well as an online editing tool and a end-user interface, available on clavis.no. Providing a more advanced use case, we demonstrate how we implement Clavis in tandem with computer vision, providing users with a single tool to quickly and reliably identify taxa using different technologies.
digital identification keys, citizen science, data format, taxonomy, FAIR
Wouter Koch
TDWG 2023