A federated database of taxon pages in the Italian Biodiversity Network

Abstract

Primary biodiversity data are often organised in federated databases in the framework of big international projects and initiatives. Other data are normally organised into isolated resources: ecological, morphological and morpho-anatomic databases, checklists, archives of digital identification tools, etc. These data, which do not refer specifically to one specimen or observation, but to a taxon, can be addressed to as “taxon-related data”. In the framework of the Italian Biodiversity Network, taxon-related data have been aggregated by using a federated approach, with the creation of a network of data providers, which required the development of a communication protocol, the species-related data (SRD) protocol and of a simple data format (the SRD format). The SRD federated database aggregates currently ca. 70,000 taxon pages for several groups of organisms: vascular plants, lichens, mosses, algae, freshwater fishes and butterflies. All these resources can be queried by using one simple interface in the web portal of the Italian Biodiversity Network (http://www.naturaitalia.it/nnb/).

Keywords:

• Biodiversity informatics
• data format
• taxon-level data
• taxonomic information system
• wrapper
• XML

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Italian Ministry of Environment (MATTM) in the framework of the National project “Sistema Ambiente 2010” for the development of the Italian National Biodiversity Node (NNB).