| Description: |
The Species File Group (SFG) endeavors to build tools and community structures that empower researchers and collections staff in their long-term collective efforts to gather, share, and learn from biodiversity data. One such tool is TaxonWorks, now in its 10th year of development. TaxonWorks provides a collaborative workbench where scientists, collection managers, students, and volunteers capture and build on the key data and concepts we use to Describe Life (TaxonWorks motto). It provides a growing number of ways to share descriptions, from Darwin Core Archives, to NeXML-formatted observations and keys, to checklists, and bibliographies.What’s New? We have expanded the data model of TaxonWorks, added new tools and functions, and some Companion software, that is, new stand-alone code-bases.Two major additions, Unified Filters and Cached Maps, provide developers and users (and users who are developers) the ability to run complex queries across TaxonWorks' rich data model and to display quickly computed maps for datasets of notable size, 100K or more specimen and literature-based records. For example, Cached Maps can superimpose the asserted distribution and georeferenced literature and specimen records to create interactive searchable maps (Fig. 1). In TaxonWorks, we aim to empower those working with the data with tools that help them visualize and curate information. To be able to model taxon concept relationships over time to reflect different taxonomic opinions, we added RCC-5 (Region Connection Calculus; Thau et al. 2008), which will make it possible to visualize these relationships. Similarly, we built a new visual editor (Fig. 2) for displaying, editing, and citing biological associations as recorded among specimens or taxa (or both).Querying and enhancing data in a given database can be complex. We have worked on harmonizing the look-feel-function of the data filtering interfaces. With our Unified Filters, one can pass the results of one search to another filter (e.g., query for specimens for a given ... |