CHRONOS : A federation of databases to support taxonomic data preservation for the paleobiological community
Doug Fils1, Cinzia Cervato1 Vladimir Davydov2 Pat Diver3, Brian Huber4, and Mark Leckie51Iowa State University , Dept. Geological and Atmospheric Sciences, 253 Science I, Ames , Iowa , 50011 , USA (fils@chronos.org)
2 Boise State University, Boise , Idaho , USA
3 DivDat Consulting, Houston , Texas , USA
4 National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC , USA
5 University of Massachusetts , Amherst , USAEarth system history research depends increasingly upon the analysis of voluminous, multidisciplinary, time-calibrated data. CHRONOS is a community resource dedicated to making available Earth history data and information, together with a toolkit to analyze and visualize them. This international, interactive network of paleobiology, biostratigraphy, radioisotope geochronology, and sedimentary geochemistry data is made accessible through a common site (www.chronos.org) and has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation since August 2003. The paleobiological community associated with CHRONOS is organized in working groups that cover so far ten taxonomic groups. Having adopted and implemented existing standards (DarwinCore and DiGIR) for taxonomic data, CHRONOS is striving to partner with biological database projects to adapt resources developed for the bioscience community, and to promote initiatives in the paleobiological community to make available in digital format taxonomic data for the study of Phanerozoic biodiversity.
CHRONOS is currently hosting a taxonomic dictionary for Mesozoic planktonic foraminifera that is being used as a prototype for database and metadata testing. We are also working with the Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology to develop, host, and network their digital Paleobank database.