I am pleased to announce that SilverBiology has accepted the task of building a Php Port of Tony Rees’ Taxamatch (http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/taxamatch.htm). TAXAMATCH is a “fuzzy” matching algorithm for taxon names and potential applications in taxonomic databases developed by Tony Rees at the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia.

SilverBiology’s initial interest in providing an API service is in anticipation for our upcoming product called “SilverArchive” (http://www.silverbiology.com/products/silverarchive), where we help process herbarium specimen data using a human distribution model approach.  Having this tool to accurately spell check for scientific names will be highly useful for the efficiency of our software and our clients.  Our other goal is to provide services to easily inspect and clean scientific names.

This web service is an open source project and is being developed to allow unique computer aided solutions for a variety of applications.  The API will be a RESTful service that will initially support the JSON format.  We hope to extend this to XML and other requested formats.

You can find more about our project at: http://taxamatch.silverbiology.com as we continue to develop this service.  The project’s source code is located at: http://code.google.com/p/taxamatch-webservice.  If anyone is interested in testing this service and getting involved or would like to use this service when it is completed, we would love to hear from you.  Our goal is to build a service that is useful for everyone so all types of input is welcome.

This project is still in progress so no release date has been set.  We are hoping to have an Alpha release, in May 2009, with some real world examples of using the system.  We will post additional announcements as we progress with this service.  Anyone that is interested in getting involved please contact Mike Giddens (mikegiddens <at> silverbiology.com)

We want to thank David Remsen and everyone else that has already contacted us about testing and using the service.  The more initial tests and uses we come up with the better the service will become.

Regards,

Michael Giddens