The Species Dictionary service, managed by the Natural History Museum, is one of 16 projects which have received an award (of up to €5,000) from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to help evaluate the process for submitting checklists to GBIF.
GBIF would like to encourage the submission of annotated species checklists and taxonomic catalogues and has developed a suite of tools and documentation to facilitate this. Data from individual checklists will be incorporated in GBIF’s ‘Checklist Bank’ which will index all the names and provide a structure to store and qualify taxonomic data.
To make things as simple as possible, GBIF is trialling the use of a textfile-based data exchange format called Darwin Core Archive. Physically, the archive will exist as a zip file containing a series of tab-delimited text files and a couple of xml descriptor files that report the data structure and metadata describing the resource. In the case of the Species Dictionary Archive, this file will sit on a server at the Natural History Museum and be harvested periodically by GBIF and, potentially, by other interested parties. The evaluation exercise will involve testing the ease and effectiveness of the process and helping to resolve any problems.
The NBN already supplies nearly 350 sets of occurrence data to GBIF, drawn from checklists held in the NBN Gateway but this exercise provides the opportunity to provide the Species Dictionary in its entirety. Drawing upon the contents of the Name Server, that lies at the heart of the Species Dictionary, the offering will include all of the 273,114 well-formed scientific names, synonyms, variant spellings and vernacular names. These are in the Species Dictionary because they are all ‘names in use’ and, as such, will be an important contribution to the Global Names Usage Bank, a component of the Global Names Architecture that GBIF is assembling.
Related links:
Checklist evaluation awards announced
Awards for checklist publication format