The Quiet Revolution: Biodiversity Informatics and the Internet

Abstract

The massive development of biodiversity-related information systems on the Internet has created much that appears exciting but chaotic, a diversity to match biodiversity itself. This richness and the arrays of new sources are counterbalanced by the maddening difficulty in knowing what is where, or of comparing like with like. But quietly, behind the first waves of exuberance, biologists and computer scientists have started to pull together in a rising tide of coherence and organization. The fledgling field of biodiversity informatics looks set to deliver major advances that could turn the Internet into a giant global biodiversity information system.

A Case-Study of Ontology-Driven Semantic Mediation of Flower-Visiting Data from Heterogeneous Data-Stores in Three South African Natural History Collections

“…physical preparations such as pinned insects) in museum collections has caused attention to be focused on such specimen information [4]. In recent years observations of biodiversity have become important, including observations made by citizen scientists [5].…”

A Database Model for Integrating and Facilitating Collaborative Ethnomedicinal Research

“…The first is the problem of handling synonyms and homonyms occurring in both scientific and common names used for naming plants (Bisby, 2000). A number of synonymic relationships are used by systematists, including homotropic and heterotropic synonyms, pro parte synonyms, and orthographic variants of names.…”

“…One of the oldest and largest international collections of plant and animal species information, Species 2000 (Bisby et al, 1993, Bisby, 2000, Species 2000, focuses on the problem of developing taxons for the world's collections of biodiversity information. Species 2000 also acts as a metadatabase by pointing to other, locally maintained databases built within the Species 2000 framework.…”

Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life

“…Although the "quiet revolution" in biodiversity informatics (Bisby 2000) has generated numerous online resources, including some directly inspired by Wilson's essay (e.g., http://ispecies.org, http://www.eol.org), we are still some way from the goal of having available online all relevant information about a species, such as its taxonomy, evolutionary history, genomics, morphology, ecology, and behaviour. While the biodiversity community has been developing a plethora of databases, some with overlapping goals and duplicated content (Thomas 2009), Wikipedia has been slowly growing to the point where it now has over 100,000 pages on biological taxa.…”