Identifying and relating biological concepts in the Catalogue of Life

New approaches in developing medicinal herbs databases

Medicinal herbs databases have become a crucial part of organizing new scientific literature generated in medicinal herbs field, as well as new drug discoveries in the information era. The aim of this review was to track the current status of medicinal herbs databases. Search for finding medicinal herbs databases was carried out via Google and PubMed. PubMed was searched for papers introducing medicinal herbs databases by the recruited search strategy. Papers with an active database on the web were included in the review. Google was also searched for medicinal herbs databases. Both retrieved papers and databases were reviewed by the authors. In this review, the current status of 25 medicinal herbs databases was reviewed, and the important characteristics of databases were mentioned. The reviewed databases had a great variety in terms of characteristics and functions. Finally, some recommendations for the efficient development of medicinal herbs databases were suggested. Although contemporary medicinal herbs databases represent much useful information, adding some features to these databases could assist them to have better functionality. This work may not cover all the necessary information, but we hope that our review can provide readers with fundamental concepts, perspectives and suggestions for constructing more useful databases.

Biodiversity analysis in the digital era

This paper explores what the virtual biodiversity e-infrastructure will look like as it takes advantage of advances in ‘Big Data’ biodiversity informatics and e-research infrastructure, which allow integration of various taxon-level data types (genome, morphology, distribution and species interactions) within a phylogenetic and environmental framework. By overcoming the data scaling problem in ecology, this integrative framework will provide richer information and fast learning to enable a deeper understanding of biodiversity evolution and dynamics in a rapidly changing world. The Atlas of Living Australia is used as one example of the advantages of progressing towards this future. Living in this future will require the adoption of new ways of integrating scientific knowledge into societal decision making.

This article is part of the themed issue ‘From DNA barcodes to biomes’.

Controlling the taxonomic variable: Taxonomic concept resolution for a southeastern United States herbarium portal

Overview. Taxonomic names are imperfect identifiers of specific and sometimes conflicting taxonomic perspectives in aggregated biodiversity data environments. The inherent ambiguities of names can be mitigated using syntactic and semantic conventions developed under the taxonomic concept approach. These include: (1) representation of taxonomic concept labels (TCLs: name sec. source) to precisely identify name usages and meanings, (2) use of parent/child relationships to assemble separate taxonomic perspectives, and (3) expert provision of Region Connection Calculus articulations (RCC–5: congruence, [inverse] inclusion, overlap, exclusion) that specify how data identified to different-sourced TCLs can be integrated. Application of these conventions greatly increases trust in biodiversity data networks, most of which promote unitary taxonomic 'syntheses' that obscure the actual diversity of expert-held views. Better design solutions allow users to control the taxonomic variable and thereby assess the robustness of their biological inferences under different perspectives. A unique constellation of prior efforts – including the powerful Symbiota collections software platform, the Euler/X multi-taxonomy alignment toolkit, and the "Weakley Flora" which entails 7,000 concepts and more than 75,000 RCC–5 articulations – provides the opportunity to build a first full-scale concept resolution service for SERNEC, the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, currently with 60 member herbaria and 2 million occurrence records.

Intellectual merit. We have developed a multi-dimensional, step-wise plan to transition SERNEC's data culture from name- to concept-based practices. (1) We will engage SERNEC experts through annual, regional workshops and follow-up interactions that will foster buy-in and ultimately the completion of 12 community-identified use cases. (2). We will leverage RCC–5 data from the Weakley Flora and further development of the Euler/X logic reasoning toolkit to provide comprehensive genus- to variety-level concept alignments for at least 10 major flora treatments with highest relevance to SERNEC. The visualizations and estimated > 1 billion inferred concept-to-concept relations will effectively drive specimen data integration in the transformed portal. (3) We will expand Symbiota's taxonomy and occurrence schemas and related user interfaces to support the new concept data, including novel batch and map-based specimen determination modules, with easy output options in Darwin Core Archive format. (4) Through combinations of the new technology, enlisted taxonomic expertise, and SERNEC's large image resources, we will upgrade minimally 80% of all SERNEC specimen identifications from names to the narrowest suitable TCLs, or add "uncertainty" flags to specimens needing further study. (5) We will utilize the novel tools and data to demonstrate how controlling for the taxonomic variable in 12 use cases variously drives the outcomes of evolutionary, ecological, and conservation-based research hypotheses.

Broader impacts. Our project is focused on just one herbarium network, but the potential impact is as wide as Darwin Core or even comparative biology. We believe that trust in networked biodiversity data depends on open and dynamic system designs, allowing expert access and resolution of multiple conflicting views that reflect the complex realities of ongoing taxonomic research. Taking well over 1 million SERNEC records from name- to TCL-resolution will show that "big" specimen data can pass the credibility threshold needed to validate the substantive data mobilization investment. We will mentor one postdoctoral researcher (UNC), two Ph.D. students (ASU, UIUC), and at least 15 undergraduate students (ASU). Each of our workshops will capacitate 10-15 SERNEC experts, who in turn can recruit colleagues and students at their home collections. We will incorporate the project theme and use cases into undergraduate courses taught at six institutions and reaching an estimated 300-500 students annually (10-40% minority students). At each institution, project members will make a systematic effort to recruit new students from underrepresented groups. Our group's leadership of Symbiota (with close ties to iDigBio), SERNEC, and local biodiversity projects and centers will further promote the new data culture. We will create a feature story "Where do plant species occur?" for ASU's popular "Ask A Biologist" website, and a series of undergraduate student-led "How-To" videos that illustrate the use case workflows, including the creation of multi-taxonomy alignments.

Making species checklists understandable to machines - a shift from relational databases to ontologies

BACKGROUND

The scientific names of plants and animals play a major role in Life Sciences as information is indexed, integrated, and searched using scientific names. The main problem with names is their ambiguous nature, because more than one name may point to the same taxon and multiple taxa may share the same name. In addition, scientific names change over time, which makes them open to various interpretations. Applying machine-understandable semantics to these names enables efficient processing of biological content in information systems. The first step is to use unique persistent identifiers instead of name strings when referring to taxa. The most commonly used identifiers are Life Science Identifiers (LSID), which are traditionally used in relational databases, and more recently HTTP URIs, which are applied on the Semantic Web by Linked Data applications.

RESULTS

We introduce two models for expressing taxonomic information in the form of species checklists. First, we show how species checklists are presented in a relational database system using LSIDs. Then, in order to gain a more detailed representation of taxonomic information, we introduce meta-ontology TaxMeOn to model the same content as Semantic Web ontologies where taxa are identified using HTTP URIs. We also explore how changes in scientific names can be managed over time.

CONCLUSIONS

The use of HTTP URIs is preferable for presenting the taxonomic information of species checklists. An HTTP URI identifies a taxon and operates as a web address from which additional information about the taxon can be located, unlike LSID. This enables the integration of biological data from different sources on the web using Linked Data principles and prevents the formation of information silos. The Linked Data approach allows a user to assemble information and evaluate the complexity of taxonomical data based on conflicting views of taxonomic classifications. Using HTTP URIs and Semantic Web technologies also facilitate the representation of the semantics of biological data, and in this way, the creation of more "intelligent" biological applications and services.