Bottom-up Taxon Characterisations with Shared Knowledge: Describing Specimens in a Semantic Context

Using the angiosperm order Caryophyllales, we will provide an exemplar use case on optimizing the taxonomic research process with respect to delimitation and characterisation (“description”) of taxa using the the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) Platform for Cybertaxonomy. The workflow for sample data handling of the EDIT platform will be extended: Character data (data on genotypic and phenotypic characters of any type, here focusing on morphology) will be captured and stored in structured form. The structure consists of character and character state matrices for individual specimens instead of taxa, which shall allow to generate taxon characterisations by aggregating the data sets for the individual specimens included. To ensure data integrity, especially for the aggregation process, semantic web technologies will be used to establish and continuously elaborate expert community-coordinated exemplar vocabularies with term ontologies and explanations for characters and states. In cooperation with the "German Federation for Biological Data" (GFBio), the GFBio Terminology Service is used for publishing the ontologies via a public API. The EDIT platform will be extended to use and integrate the GFBio Terminology Service in order to work with the latest version of the ontology used for specimen respective taxon descriptions.