After a wonderful week in Montpellier, France and listening to some very interesting talks it’s time to get back to the daily grind and continue our developments. Before we do, I wanted to recap on some of the activities SilverBiology was involved in.
Another session of Nomina has been concluded. EOL was nice enough to again host this workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. This time the focus was on methods for reconciling heterogeneous taxonomic data. The group this time was made up of myself from SilverBiology, GBif, EOL, and Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).
Last week was the fourth gathering for Nomina. These meetings have been created by EOL & GBIF in collaboration with BHL (Biodiverstiy Heritage Library). The goal for this meeting was to improve Taxonomic Name Recognition, discover the tools and algorithms that are currently being used and how to merge and improve what we are currently doing to make things faster and better. With over 35,000 books and more then 14 million scientific pages from the BHL it is important to provide the most accurate tools to help discover information from the past.
The workspace used for this meeting includes links to web applications, source code, shared dictionaries, test files, and other useful resources for those in need of tools and services for finding, parsing, and processing taxonomic names. http://code.google.com/p/taxon-name-processing
The meeting was very productive and as changes and improvements are made to the individual projects the overall goals will be one step closer.
SilverBiology’s purpose at this meeting was to demonstrate and see how our TAXAMATCH web service can be used with fuzzy matching on scientific names that are misspelled. Our goal is to implement this with the Global Names Index (globalnames.org) and GBIF’s species checklist. These will be public web services so anyone can use to search for scientific names.
TAXAMATCH was originally developed by Tony Rees at OBIS and developed in PL/SQL. Our open source version is a PHP/MySql implementation of the algorithm with a few additional configurations. To learn more about Tony’s project and the continuation of our project just follow the links below.
Original TAXAMATCH: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/taxamatch.htm
Our web service version: http://taxamatch.silverbiology.com (IN DEVELOPMENT)
If you would like to see more about the past Nomina workshops you can find them here:
Nomina 4: http://hickory.eol.org:8081/display/public/Nomina+IV
Nomina 2: http://blog.eol.org/2008/04/24/nomina-2-workshop-succeeded
