The Catalogue of Life: a global partnership between Species 2000 and ITIS, to index the world's known species
Bisby, F.A.1, Ruggiero, M.21 Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics, School of Plant Sciences, The University of Reading, READING RG6 6AS, UK
2 Integrated Taxonomic Information System, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 20013-7012, U.S.A.
In 2001, two of the largest projects devoted to indexing the world's species agreed to collaborate in creating a single 'Catalogue of Life'. The initial Species 2000 and ITIS product is now available as an annual edition published on CD-ROM, and at the websites, and it is planned to combine the dynamic checklist facility in the future. Species 2000 and ITIS have created both an architecture for creating a comprehensive electronic Catalogue of Life and a strategy for implementing it over 10 years from 2001 - 2011. The joint programme is now embarking on a three-year production scale development from 2003-2006 supported by the EC, the Japanese Government and US, Mexican and Canadian Federal Agencies. In an additional push to accelerate the process, the joint programme is entering a special MOU with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility from which it has already received support from its seed money programme.
The programme is developing a distributed system in which a virtual catalogue is composed from sectors supplied by many provider taxonomic databases around the world. The synonymic checklist functions both as a synonymic index to the checklist and as a gateway to further information. A Global Hub will unite the global species databases that provide checklists covering a complete higher taxon, and the programme is experimenting with one or more Regional Hubs that will connect major regional taxonomic checklist databases as well.
Current challenges being addressed by the programme include: how to deal with alternative taxonomic systems; how to anticipate the next generation of concept-based taxonomic databases; how to create an economic model to support the contributing databases; and how to implement a web-service 'synonymy server' and a 'name usage server'. But towering over these is the remaining taxonomic challenge of integrating and inter-relating the fragmented and contradictory content of the world's regional, national and local taxonomies for groups where this task has not already been started. The 2003 edition of the Catalogue of Life lists 304,000 species of viruses, microbes, algae, fungi, plants and animals - a substantial start, but still just 17% of the species diversity presently known.