Exploring historical trends using taxonomic name metadata Indra

Background: Authority and year information have been attached to taxonomic names since Linnaean times. The systematic structure of taxonomic nomenclature facilitates the ability to develop tools that can be used to explore historical trends that may be associated with taxonomy. Results: From the over 10.7 million taxonomic names that are part of the uBio system [4], approximately 3 million names were identified to have taxonomic authority information from the years 1750 to 2004. A pipe-delimited file was then generated, organized according to a Linnaean hierarchy and by years from 1750 to 2004, and imported into an Excel workbook. A series of macros were developed to create an Excel-based tool and a complementary Web site to explore the taxonomic data. A cursory and speculative analysis of the data reveals observable trends that may be attributable to significant events that are of both taxonomic (e.g., publishing of key monographs) and societal importance (e.g., world wars). The findings also help quantify the number of taxonomic descriptions that may be made available through digitization initiatives. Conclusion: Temporal organization of taxonomic data can be used to identify interesting biological epochs relative to historically significant events and ongoing efforts. We have developed an Excel workbook and complementary Web site that enables one to explore taxonomic trends for Linnaean taxonomic groupings, from Kingdoms to Families. Background Taxonomic names represent one of the fundamental tokens that bridge biological knowledge, regardless of its form, across multiple resources [1,2]. The standardized format of Genus species associated with a taxonomic name is universally accepted and identifiable across multiple levels of expertise. Furthermore, a well-formed taxonomic name includes a proper name and a four-digit number, which represent the taxonomic authorship and date of description. Efforts such as the Catalogue of Life Program (COLP [3]), an international joint effort to create a single checklist for all known species, are a significant step towards developing common resources to keep track and integrate organism-based biological information across disparate resources. The Universal Biological Indexer and Organizer (uBio [4]), is a complementary taxonomic information system designed to provide the core services that address namebased impediments to information retrieval [5,6]. In addition to collecting taxonomic and vernacular names from centralized resources such as the aforementioned COLP, scientific names and authority information are also gathered from a range of sources that provide downloads or data transfers. Through the use of natural language processing techniques, organism name, authority, and Published: 13 May 2008 BMC Evolutionary Biology 2008, 8:144 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-8-144 Received: 30 August 2007 Accepted: 13 May 2008 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/8/144 © 2008 Sarkar et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.