B S S acres: Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e94903
Sundacs «di: 10.3897/biss.6.94903

Conference Abstract

Linked Data Publishing of the World Register of
Marine Species (WoRMS) as a Basis for Uniformly
Linking-up Resources to Accepted Taxon Names

Laurian Van Maldeghem#, Marc Portier+, Leen Vandepitte?, Britt Lonneville+, Bart Vanhoorne?,
Lennert Tybergheint

$ VLIZ vzw (Flanders Marine Institute), Ostend, Belgium

Corresponding author: Laurian Van Maldeghem (laurian.van.maldeghem@vliz.be),
Marc Portier (marc.portier@vliz.be)

Received: 15 Sep 2022 | Published: 15 Sep 2022

Citation: Van Maldeghem L, Portier M, Vandepitte L, Lonneville B, Vanhoorne B, Tyberghein L (2022) Linked
Data Publishing of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) as a Basis for Uniformly Linking-up
Resources to Accepted Taxon Names. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e94903.
https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.94903

Abstract

The World Register of Marine Species (VWoORMS) is an authoritative classification and
catalogue of marine names. The WoRMS portal and available web-services are a gateway
to access a treasure-chest of information, not only on taxon names themselves, but also on
their mutual relations (e.g., original names, accepted versus unaccepted names, taxonomic
classification), and related information such as ecological traits, distributions and linked
literature.

Over its fifteen years of existence, WoRMS has not only been growing in content and
quality, thanks to the voluntary efforts of more than 300 experts worldwide, it has also kept
a technical trajectory that involves adapting to new standards and technologies. Although
WoRMS has always been relatively easily accessible through its portal and web services,
and applied the basic data-sharing principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable,
and Reusable), there is still room for improvement. The recently growing call for globally
uniform identifiers coming from the application of the FAIR data sharing principles, and the
growing investment into globally open and interlinked "digital twin" representations of our
oceans and the organisms found in them, have introduced the fundamentals for growing a

© Van Maldeghem L et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source
are credited.

2 Van Maldeghem L et al

marine knowledge graph, and as a consequence, has directed some technical attention
towards applying semantic web technologies.

WOoRMS plays a key role in the field of (marine) biodiversity, as this research field strongly
relies on the correct usage of species names, and understanding the taxonomic
relationships between taxon names. As WoRMS is regarded as the authoritative resource
for marine names, it is also heavily used as a quality-control tool for the correct usage of
taxon names within various European and global initiatives. WWoRMS provides support to
global databases and infrastructures that use (or are in need of) a marine taxonomic
backbone, such as the LifeVVatch Species Information Backbone, the Ocean Biodiversity
Information System (OBIS) and the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), as well as
improves the content and strengthens relationships with environment-independent
initiatives and infrastructures such as the Catalogue of Life (COL), the Barcode of Life Data
System (BoLD) & GenBank. In addition to the taxonomic value of WoRMS, it is also highly
valued for its available information on species traits, which form a critical component in
ecological marine research.

In its role as a marine taxonomic backbone, along with being linked to numerous other
environment-independent initiatives and infrastructures, WORMS has always required an
adaptability towards the challenging new ways specific applications and concrete research
have been choosing to apply the identifiers affixed by WoRMS. It is in this tradition we now
announce and describe our approach to publish the content of the register as fully linked
open data, using semantic web technologies.

We describe in some detail the choices made

° to select and apply specific vocabularies that already exist for the description and
interconnected linking of taxon names,

° to address the tension between hanging on to an historic (URN) persistent identifier
and providing a dereferenceable URI that supports the appreciated "follow your
nose" property,

° to link to other relevant registries,

° to design meaningful predicates for inbound links to the register and, more
technically

° to divide the available content into meaningful sub-sections for retrieval of optional
detail, and

° to provide a roadmap for meaningful fragmentations of the full register to allow for
an effective consumption of the relevant (e.g., newly updated) parts into specific
data-consumption scenarios.

We believe this work to be an important step towards achieving some future goals. It
should further facilitate the production of automated, managed or hybrid crosswalks
between various taxonomic registers and classifications. To be especially considered here,
is helping to make omics taxonomic references more meaningfully comparable with
WoRMS. In the process of others linking their digital objects (e.g., services, datasets,
publications, experts) to taxon IDs in WoRMS, they are effectively also linking to each

Linked Data Publishing of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) ... 3

other, which opens the doors between apparently unconnected bodies. Its continuing use
as a global standard and trustworthy reference of community-accepted names _ for
biological taxa becomes the essential glue connecting all sorts of services, initiatives,
communities.

Keywords

taxonomy, biology, Linked Open Data, marine biodiversity, FAIR, open data

Presenting author

Laurian Van Maldeghem

Presented at

TDWG 2022