The Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA), Bishop Museum (Honolulu), California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), and Missouri Botanical Gardens (St Louis) have received an ABI innovation award to establish the Global Names Architecture (GNA), a modular suite of databases, applications, and semantic web services that will help integrate information across the Life Sciences. The project will extend existing proof of concept components, explore alternative solutions for technical challenges, and integrate the components into a pilot GNA. The GNA capitalizes on Linnaeus' system of Latin scientific names for organisms, a system that has endured as one of the oldest and most universal standards in science. Virtually all information in biology is given context by evolution and the hierarchical pattern of shared similarities it has produced. Scientists name species and change them with growing knowledge about their evolution and relationships. These changes create a tangled network of synonyms that, along with homonyms and variant spellings, make it difficult to manage information effectively The GNA will create a system that enables us to translate names correctly across the literature and on-line datasets. While the GNA has implications for the long-term management of information in the life sciences, the initial beneficiaries will be the more than 10,000 taxonomists worldwide, on whose expertise our understanding of the world's biodiversity rests. A scientific name 'usage bank' coupled with the Biodiversity Heritage Library's CiteBank will generate shared indexes and access keys to the taxonomic literature, the source of most of our knowledge about nearly 2 million species. New nomenclatural registries founded by the co-operation of the Index Fungorum and the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature's ZooBank will broadcast new discoveries as they are registered. Other tools will help taxonomists collaborate to build authoritative catalogs of the Earth?s biodiversity, then merge and integrate them, a process that GNA will transform into a semantic cyberinfrastructure that will organize the growing, internet-accessible, knowledge of Earth's biosphere. Ultimately, other NSF grantees in the life sciences should be able to augment their Data Management Plans by exposing their web sites to services that will create taxonomic indices. More information about this project can be obtained from http://globalnames.org or dpatterson@mbl.edu.
The overall goal of the Global Names Architecture (GNA) ABI Innovation project (www.globalnames.org/) was to provide an array of open services that take advantage of the usefulness of scientific names of organisms as a metadata layer and resolution service to manage biodiversity data, and to build an infrastructure capable of evolving into a names-based cyberinfrastructure for Biology in the Big Data world. To this end we have developed and refined a wide range of softwares and services (www.globalnames.org/Components), concepts, content, and visible and sustainable products that jointly establish the GNA infrastructure as a persistent tool to reconcile names-based information, with new development also addressing the need to integrate taxonomic concepts (see http://taxonbytes.org/prior-work-on-concept-taxonomy-2013/). The GNA environment now holds the largest compilation of name strings used as scientific names of organisms; including reconciliation of approximately two thirds of all 22 million name strings held by the Global Names Index; a prototype Union classification with 2.2 million entries; open software code available at www.globalnames.org/Available_code; and vastly improved indexing of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (from 7.5 million to nearly 30 million unique name strings). GNA has collaborated and published nationally and internationally to promote its inclusive vision. As a result, the concept of a names-based cyberarchitecture is now widely accepted as an essential component of the infrastructure that will be needed to build a Big Dataversion of the biodiversity information world. Items from the GNA Library of Ruby Gems have been downloaded almost 300,000 times. A follow-up ABI Development award was granted to the GNA team at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woodshole to further develop names discovery, indexing, and reconciliation.
