Federated Description Services and the Library of Life; or, What can we do with SDD anyway?
Kevin Thiele, Centre for Biological Information Technology, AustraliaTaxonomy seeks to construct an abstraction of the real world. This abstraction has several main layers including specimens (slightly abstracted samples of the real world), names and concepts (the core of the abstraction) and phylogenies (relationships between taxonomic entities). Positioned between the abstraction and the real world are maps - floras, monographs, field guides etc - that allow users to identify and compare real entities in the real world with the abstracted entities of the taxonomic world.
Traditionally, data management in these layers has been rather ad hoc. Recent work is providing globally integrated, federated data management in some layers - specimen management by the virtual museums and herbaria, names and concepts by names services such as IPNI, phylogenies by the Tree of Life. The middle layer, which holds descriptive data, has been less well served.
The TDWG SDD Standard will allow for better management of this important middle mapping layer. SDD is being designed to allow for effective markup of both highly structured data (e.g. DELTA and Lucid data files) and semistructured (natural-language) data. Once marked up, these data structures will be fully transformable and will be capable of lossless roundtripping between applications. Once a substantial amount of data have been marked up using SDD, unparalleled opportunities for data discovery and mining will arise. If properly handled, these will bring substantial efficiency dividends to taxonomy.
Once all the standards - for specimen data, names, phylogenies and descriptions - are in place, it will be possible to create a truly global and comprehensive Library of Life. This talk will address some ideas as to how a global Library of Life, based on SDD and the other TDWG standards, may transform taxonomy and the relationship between taxonomy and the real world.