BackgroundThe digitization of biodiversity data is leading to the widespread application of taxon names that are superfluous, ambiguous or incorrect, resulting in mismatched records and inflated species numbers. The ultimate consequences of misspelled names and bad taxonomy are erroneous scientific conclusions and faulty policy decisions. The lack of tools for correcting this ‘names problem’ has become a fundamental obstacle to integrating disparate data sources and advancing the progress of biodiversity science.ResultsThe TNRS, or Taxonomic Name Resolution Service, is an online application for automated and user-supervised standardization of plant scientific names. The TNRS builds upon and extends existing open-source applications for name parsing and fuzzy matching. Names are standardized against multiple reference taxonomies, including the Missouri Botanical Garden's Tropicos database. Capable of processing thousands of names in a single operation, the TNRS parses and corrects misspelled names and authorities, standardizes variant spellings, and converts nomenclatural synonyms to accepted names. Family names can be included to increase match accuracy and resolve many types of homonyms. Partial matching of higher taxa combined with extraction of annotations, accession numbers and morphospecies allows the TNRS to standardize taxonomy across a broad range of active and legacy datasets.ConclusionsWe show how the TNRS can resolve many forms of taxonomic semantic heterogeneity, correct spelling errors and eliminate spurious names. As a result, the TNRS can aid the integration of disparate biological datasets. Although the TNRS was developed to aid in standardizing plant names, its underlying algorithms and design can be extended to all organisms and nomenclatural codes. The TNRS is accessible via a web interface at http://tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org/ and as a RESTful web service and application programming interface. Source code is available at https://github.com/iPlantCollaborativeOpenSource/TNRS/.

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Abstract.-The Audubon Core Multimedia Resource Metadata Schema (simply "Audubon Core" or "AC") is a representation-free vocabulary for the description of biodiversity multimedia resources and collections, now in the final stages as a proposed standard under TDWG Biodiversity Information Standards. By defining only four terms as mandatory, it seeks to lighten the burden for providing or using multimedia useful for biodiversity science. At the same time it offers rich optional metadata terms that can help curators of multimedia collections provide authoritative media that document species occurrence, ecosystems, identification tools, ontologies, and many other kinds of biodiversity documents or data. About half of the vocabulary is re-used from other relevant controlled vocabularies that are often already in use for multimedia metadata, thereby reducing the mapping burden on existing repositories. A central design goal is to allow consuming applications to have a high likelihood of discovering suitable resources, reducing the human examination effort that might be required to decide if the resource is fit for the purpose of the application.

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