SEEK Project Taxonomic Object Service: Making Sense of Names and Concepts
Stewart, Aimee M., Gales, Robert, Software Developers, Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas, 1345 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. Email: astewart@ku.edu; rgales@ku.edu.The NSF-funded, Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge Project (SEEK, seek.ecoinformatics.org), is addressing the modeling and management of taxonomic names and concepts in a database context and network architecture that will support Internet search and retrieval of concepts, names, and the taxonomic and nomenclatural relationships among them. The SEEK Taxon Working Group has sought to enumerate the use cases and the questions that will likely be asked of a concept resolution and name service by systematists, ecologists and other users, and then to implement a production web service that address those needs. The public SEEK Taxonomic Object Service (TOS) will provide information about the relationships among taxa via SOAP and web interfaces. The TOS has been written in an extensible object-oriented architecture that will allow users to plug in their own algorithms for matching concepts and determining the relevance of taxonomic relationships. We will demonstrate the SEEK TOS during the presentation.