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Rollout
We need to have a clear statement as to what the effect and benefits are of publicizing the GNI portal. The current web application doesn’t provide immediate and intuitive utility as it stands. A demonstration may require, for example, a partner such as ITIS demonstrating the ability to easily discover, and link to, related resources via the index. Let’s put these here as clear statements and refine/expand them.
Use Case #1 – The GNI is a resource publicization system where publishers can publish links to their content tied to a taxon name. One use therefore is for the publishers of one resource to identify content in a second resource based on the same taxon being referenced in both resources. An example use cited at the Woods Hole meeting is the Bishop Museum Catalogue of Fishes, an image database, using the GNI to access Catalogue of Life links for all fish species. A second example would be ITIS using the GNI to provide links to GenBank for taxa with nucleotide entries.
Use Case #2 – Similar to use case 1 were GBIF and EoL use the GNI to access links to the Consortium for the Barcode of Life BoLD database to provide links to BoLD from species or taxon pages in their respective portals.
Use Case #3 – The uBio LinkIT tool is refined to utilize access the GNI index via the web service interface. It is used to provide dynamic links to ITIS, the IUCN RedList Species pages and Tropicos within published online Flora such as the Flora of China.
We could integrate taxonomic name services with the GNI to provide expanded access to the publicized links within the index. Application of different components of reconciliation could be demonstrated as “before and after” exercises where the application of orthographic de-aliasing, nomenclatural and taxonomic synonymy, and the use of vernacular names could be quantified and shown.
Use Case #4 – Lexical Mapping of the GNI index via TaxaMatch or another lexical mapping application. GBIF is developing a PHP port of TaxaMatch. We could perform an evaluation of the names index and quantify the degree of integration that a lexical matching exercise would provide. In this case it might be useful to have the TaxaMatch process the index directly, storing the lexical token it derives within the data index itself. Need more input from TaxaMatch guys for this.
Use Case #5 – Access to a nomenclator like IPNI which provides over 200,000 basionym mappings or Index Fungorum that provides a majority of fungal species combinations tied to the basionym enable nomenclatural synonymy to be employed across the GNI index and the additive effective measured. In this case I would imagine an external client application that calls both a name service and the GNI via the API. The source for these nomenclatural assertions would be from an external name service.
Use Case #6 – Similar but with additional synonymic expansion for taxonomic synonymy and perhaps an additive example that utilizes all of these reconciled synonym classes.
Applying the metromap metaphor, we could illustrate a workflow that shows a data publisher registering a data resource using the IPT to serve, for example, the IUCN Redlist, containing a complete synonymized hierarchical checklist with threat status information, etc. Those data are registered and published. We could then initiate a series of accesses to the registry and IPT instance that engage not only the GNI portal but also the EoL, GBIF or other portals as well. Imagine following these threads from that publication instance to an open full text document (Flora of China) that when refreshed with the LinkIT tool suddenly highlights every red-listed species. Note that this also provides a link to the EoL Page. You go there and where, a moment ago, there was no threat status information, it is now there. Then you go to the uBioRSS application and select the RedList from the list of available classifications. It integrates the data and suddenly you are viewing the most recent conservation journal articles on red-listed plants.
Use Case #7 – Not much of a use-case but something that could showcase integration of services. GNI accepts freeform TaxonRank values that require some sort of de-aliasing mechanism in order to enable integration and retrieval via Taxon Rank. GBIF vocabulary services provide a TaxonRank vocabulary and terms list for enabling this de-aliasing. A function for keeping up-to-date on relevant vocabularies, much as the IPT does, is a good demonstration of integration particularly if tied to some sort of visible evaluation showing the improvements in getting all records mapped to a controlled list.