Web-based taxonomy
Encyclopedia
Web-based taxonomy is the effort by taxonomists
to use the World Wide Web
in order to create unified, consensus taxonomies of life on Earth.
In his 2002 paper on the subject, H. Charles J. Godfray called for the creation of Web-based organisations to collect all the accumulated literature on a taxonomic group into a centralized knowledge base and make this data available through the Web as a unified taxonomy, so that it can be more easily examined and revised. Such a platform would be owned and maintained by a taxonomic working group, governed by an editor or an editorial board. An example of such a platform is FishBase
.
The notion of Web-based consensus taxonomies remains controversial because, as two Australian researchers pointed out, taxonomic names are not fixed but hypotheses, and therefore in constant change.
Alpha taxonomy
Alpha taxonomy is the discipline concerned with finding, describing and naming species of living or fossil organisms. This field is supported by institutions holding collections of these organisms, with relevant data, carefully curated: such institutes include natural history museums, herbaria and...
to use the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
in order to create unified, consensus taxonomies of life on Earth.
In his 2002 paper on the subject, H. Charles J. Godfray called for the creation of Web-based organisations to collect all the accumulated literature on a taxonomic group into a centralized knowledge base and make this data available through the Web as a unified taxonomy, so that it can be more easily examined and revised. Such a platform would be owned and maintained by a taxonomic working group, governed by an editor or an editorial board. An example of such a platform is FishBase
FishBase
FishBase is a comprehensive database of information about fish species . It is the largest and most extensively accessed online database on adult finfish on the web...
.
The notion of Web-based consensus taxonomies remains controversial because, as two Australian researchers pointed out, taxonomic names are not fixed but hypotheses, and therefore in constant change.