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Abstract Detail


Systematics/Phytogeography / Taxonomie/ Section

Murrell, Zack E. [1], Poindexter, Derick B. [2].

Bioinformatics and the regional herbarium network SERNEC.

The life sciences have historically been focused primarily on innovation and discovery rather than standardization. The emerging semantic web and concomitant social networking applications are now enabling biodiversity scientists to develop and employ standards that allow unambiguous communication about types of organisms, their attributes, and distributions. To address such critical issues as biodiversity conservation, habitat fragmentation and global warming, the scientific community needs to reach a consensus regarding the distribution of information in a format that is standard compliant. In addition to these specific challenges, this community also faces the same challenges other digital initiatives encounter: the conversion of legacy data, digitization of a wide variety of media, long-term storage and preservation of large datasets, and shared management of distributed assets. SERNEC (SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections [see www.sernec.org]) is a NSF-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) that organizes a community to facilitate the achievement of these goals at a realizable yet powerful scale. This regional consortium is a “virtual community” of herbarium curators that is working in collaboration with the Flora of the Southeast, Morphbank, SunSite, Herbis, and NBII. This grassroots network provides an electronic federated database that ideally seeks to disseminate all organism occurrences and attribute data in a compliant format, and provide critical tools for integrating large datasets with organisms identified using divergent taxonomic standards. This goal will be reached by working in concert with the larger global arena, led by the international efforts of The Taxonomic Database Working Group (TDWG) or Biodiversity Information Standards.


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Related Links:
SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections


1 - Appalachian State University, Biology, 572 Rivers Street, Boone, North Carolina, 28608, USA
2 - Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, 28608, USA

Keywords:
Networks
community standards
herbarium
digitization.

Presentation Type: Poster:Posters for Sections
Session: P
Location: Ball Room & Party Room/SUB
Date: Monday, July 28th, 2008
Time: 12:30 PM
Number: PSP070
Abstract ID:851


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