1 School of Plant Sciences, the University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AS, UK
The Species 2000 Metadatabase has been designed as a management tool for the Catalogue of Life (Species 2000 & ITIS partnership). The metadatabase currently contains information on 175 global species databases and 3 pan-European databases. This information was collated and compiled during the last 7 years by Susan Brandt, Susan McCue, Pamela Harling, Adeline Soulier-Perkins, Yde de Jong, Susanah Kimani and Yuri Roskov. The metadatabase software was designed by Tim Sutton & Peter Brewer at the University of Reading, UK.
The current version of the metadatabase stores information on the following 6 sectors: ‘Database General Info’, ‘GSD Sector Details’, ‘Custodians’, ‘Associated People’ and ‘Contact Details’. Two more sectors; ‘Management Tool for Classification’ and ‘Wrapper Details’, are under development. Information in 97 fields of the metadatabase is compiled using a survey questionnaire specially designed by Species 2000 and mailed to selected target database custodians.
The metadatabase, as web based resource, provides daily information support for human management of the Species 2000 distributed project. This is, also, a central storage of metadata for the assembly and production of the Annual Checklist. In future, the metadatabase will be linked to the SPICE software of the Dynamic Checklist to provide metadata, operational information on taxonomic sectors and available wrappers directly to the Common Access System.