The future of the past in the present: biodiversity informatics and geological time

By

Baker, Edward
Johnson, Kenneth G
Young, Jeremy R.

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2011

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

150

Pages

397-405

Subjects

biodiversity informatics , GBIF , Palaeontology , Scratchpads , web services

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2350

 

Abstract

The biological and palaeontological communities have approached the problem of informatics separately, creating a divide between communities that is both technological and sociological in nature. In this paper we describe one new advance towards solving this problem - expanding the Scratchpads platform to deal with geological time. In creating this system we have attempted to make our work open to existing communities by providing a webservice of geological time data via the GBIF Vocabularies site. We have also ensured that our system can adapt to changes in the definition of geological time intervals and is capable of querying datasets independently of the format of geological age data used.