The EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy has come a long way towards providing a complete, standards-based and reliable set of tools and services supporting the taxonomic workflow (Ciardelli et al. 2009). The Platform is firmly grounded in the organisational structure of the BGBM, with several positions directly dedicated to maintenance and further development of the Platform, complemented by numerous projects that are carried out in international and national cooperation. Furthermore, we continue to count on the collaboration of the teams in Paris and Tervuren, for descriptive data and geographic mapping functionalities, respectively. However, there are a number of areas where further research and development is needed, and of course the speed of development is often limited by the available resources.

Among the topics under discussion are, inter alia:

• The integration of regional treatments (e.g. floras or faunas) with global monographic ones
• Efficient ways towards an integrated management of literature references
• Alternative approaches towards generating morphological descriptions and identification tools
• The integration of data quality indicators
• The handling of taxon concepts in a (present or absent) phylogenetic context
• How concept relations (Berendsohn & al., this session) can be handled efficiently in user interfaces
• Assignment of stable identifiers to core objects such as scientific names and taxa (needs community agreement both as to the technical implementation and as to rules applicable to identifiers when changes of objects occur).
• Synchronisation of taxonomic datasets in multiple instances of the EDIT Platform with overlapping information areas.

EDIT Platform, Taxonomy

Walter G. Berendsohn