
Senckenberg Research Institute and Museum, Frankfurt	Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem

Abstracts

TDWG 2000: Digitising Biological Collections
Taxonomic Databases Working Group, 16th Annual Meeting
Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, November 10-12, 2000

Steven Dessein, Peter Schols & Erik Smets*

MacTaxon: towards a new system for managing plant taxonomic data

* Laboratory of Plant Systematics, Institute of Botany and Microbiology, K.U. Leuven, Belgium

[Poster presentation]

Data management and data accessibility are two issues each taxonomist is dealing with. While many researchers or institutes developed their own software, satisfying universal solutions for management of plant taxonomic data remain scarce. Moreover, software ages relatively fast, making many existing solutions useless to fulfil the current challenges in plant taxonomy. Another drawback of the current software is that they often provide solutions for only one specific taxonomic topic (e.g. pollen, seed, herbarium taxonomy, description of species...); a global solution that manages data from the different arrays of plant taxonomy does not exist. With the upcoming release of MacTaxon, in the first quarter of 2001, we present a new, all-in-one relational database system for plant taxonomists. MacTaxon will contain two major modules: a system for taxonomic data management and a Nexus editor. The first will enable managing all kinds of plant taxonomic data (e.g., wood, pollen, specimen data); the latter will provide a tool to edit Nexus files which can be further analysed by Paup and/or MacClade. MacTaxon will be available on our website for both Macintosh and Windows (http://surf.to/mactaxon). The development of MacTaxon is supported by the Systematics Association.

TDWG | Participants | Presentations | Senckenberg Museum | BGBM Biodiversity Informatics

This meeting was co-sponsored by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA)