The Catalogue of Life: Biodiversity Resource and e-Science Gateway.
(Short name: Species 2000 europa)
Throughout the member states EU policy agencies, scientific and professional bodies, and interested citizens are all constrained by the lack of a comprehensive catalogue specifying the species of which biodiversity is composed. As a result there are many cases where species cannot be precisely specified, where different sets of information cannot be matched, or where the information exists but is difficult to locate.
The EuroCat/Species 2000 europa project will pursue three objectives:
(i) to develop a distributed organisation able to assemble the Catalogue of Life and to establish it as an ongoing scientific infrastructure.
(ii) to create the Catalogue of Life as a quality, validated synonymic taxonomic checklist planned for all species in all groups and reaching critical mass during the project. It will initially contain all of the known species of plants , animals, fungi and micro-organisms that are currently available, including an integrated view of the indigenous and non-indigenous species occurring in Europe. An innovative tightly-coupled federated database system will be used to interoperate over a large distributed array of autonomous taxonomic databases covering different groups of organisms and distributed across Europe.
(iii) to test an e-Science gateway that will use the indexing property of the Catalogue to locate precise technical biodiversity information for species from other data systems in Europe and world-wide.
The EuroCat/Species 2000 europa system will provide common access to a growing catalogue of organisms embracing all species in the three European taxonomic databases, plus those in a large array of taxon databases. It will eventually be possible to locate all species in the world and data connected to them through this single point of enquiry, and to do this via alternative scientific or common names. The benefit will be that, for the first time, it will be possible to locate species of all groups, and to compare different catalogues, classifications or sources. Professionals and citizens will use it both as a resource, to locate species, and as a gateway, to move on to rich data for a specified organism from a vast array of sources.
European taxonomic institutions have a leading role in the provision of taxonomic information, and this project will develop services of global significance. Additional important users will be the European Environment Agency, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Commentators are surprised that there is not already a comprehensive catalogue of organisms to underpin activities on biodiversity in Europe and world-wide. What do exist in Europe are independent taxonomic databases owned and operated separately and based on the extensive taxonomic expertise distributed around Europe. These databases include three major EC-funded taxonomic database projects covering many groups of organisms indigenous to Europe (Euro+Med PlantBase, Fauna Europaea, & ERMS), and others that are complementary in giving world coverage, in dealing with non-indigenous species encountered in Europe, or dealing with gaps in indigenous European coverage.
The EuroCat Thematic Network will bring these existing systems into a comprehensive architecture to create a single scientific infrastructure through:
1) developing a Distributed Organisation, able to (i) assemble a comprehensive catalogue of organisms (The EuroCat Catalogue of Life) and (ii) establish a sustainable business plan for developing the catalogue as an ongoing e-Science information-infrastructure.
2) initiating a Biodiversity Resource: the EuroCat Catalogue of Life, a quality, validated, synonymic checklist planned for all species in all groups of organisms, and reaching critical mass during the project. It will initially contain all of the known species of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms that are currently available, including an integrated view of indigenous and non-indigenous species occurring in Europe. It is planned to complete the process on a global scale within four to six years from the end of this project depending on resource levels. The checklist will be composed and maintained from a distributed array of existing taxonomic databases, each enhanced on a continuing basis by taxonomic experts. It will allow users to look up the biological information, the classification accepted names, synonyms, and common names of any species, and also to obtain basic factual data about them. There is currently no such integrated biodiversity resource.
3) testing an e-Science Gateway: the EuroCat Gateway, an electronic gateway that will use the indexing property of the Catalogue to locate precise technical biodiversity information by species from other data systems in Europe and world-wide on the Internet and the GRID. The initial example will provide access to museum/herbarium specimen data via the BIOCASE project.
It is anticipated that the Catalogue of Life and the Gateway will become a valuable component of GBIF and the proposed ENBI.
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