Senckenberg Research Institute and Museum, Frankfurt |
Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem |
TDWG 2000: Digitising Biological Collections
Taxonomic Databases Working Group, 16th Annual Meeting
Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, November 10-12, 2000
* College of Life Sciences, Zhongshan University, Guangzhou 510275, China
[Presentation]
Standardized data are a necessity in a computerized database. Only data
strictly formatted according to recognized standards can produce complete and
meaningful query results. Plant specimen data, however, having been collected by
people from different countries and recorded in different languages for about
two centuries, do not adhere to standards.
Among specimen data, taxonomic data is an area of special complexity. It might
change because misidentifications are corrected, because of the change of a
taxon's position, because a synonym is replaced, or by correction of
misspellings. Most databases try to standardized the data during data entry and
many database only record the last accepted taxon data. This will help to avoid
misspellings and greatly simplify the identification history but it requires the
typist to recognize and correct non-standard data and thus unavoidably change or
omit the original data.
We believe that a database should faithfully record the whole history of the
plant specimen, including the complete determination history. The Plant Specimen
Database developed in Zhongshan University does not require typists to
standardize the data. In fact, we asked the typist to record the data exactly as
they were written We are leaving the standardization processes to be performed
by the database manager or taxonomists on separate data tables, thus conserving
the original data unchanged for later scrutiny.
TDWG | Participants | Presentations | Senckenberg Museum | BGBM Biodiversity Informatics
This meeting was co-sponsored by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) |
Page editor: W. Berendsohn, wgb@zedat.fu-berlin.de. © BGBM 2000.