uBio - Universal Biological Indexer and Organizer

I just heard about a biology taxonomy called uBio:

About uBio project

uBio is an initiative within the science library community to join international efforts to create and utilize a comprehensive and collaborative catalog of known names of all living (and once-living) organisms. The Taxonomic Name Server (TNS) catalogs names and classifications to enable tools that can help users find information on living things using any of the names that may be related to an organism.

I have no investigated it closely to determine whether it is simply a Web Service (SOAP interface) or whether it also is available on the Semantic Web (RDF).

More about what uBio does:

Information about organisms is often linked to a name.

This can create problems in information retrieval because:

• One taxon can have many names.
• The same name can refer to many taxa.

uBio is working on tools for providers of biological information that address these problems.

The uBio Taxonomic Name Server acts as a name thesaurus.

Names have many different classes of relationships that can be used to organize and retrieve information that is annotated with names. These classes are divided into two inter-connected services.

NameBank is a repository of millions of recorded biological names and facts that link those names together. [more]

ClassificationBank stores multiple classifications and taxonomic concepts that are the result of expert opinions. It extends the functionality of NameBank. [more]

All data within these components are linked to mechanisms that provide credit and attribution to experts who provide name and linkage information within the TNS. [more]

Lastly, NameBank promotes the emergence of a layered biological informatics infrastructure that allows different expert systems to share common information. This conserves scarce resources and enhances the means to support continued expert work.

A foundation for collaboration

We are currently pursuing funding to separate the two logical components of the Taxonomic Name Server into separate services.

NameBank will become a biological name server focused on serving factual nomenclatural metadata. The ClassificationBank component derive taxonomic concepts from cached NameBank records. Formalizing this division into discreet components provides us with increased collaborative opportunity by facilitating multiple taxonomic models atop a common core set of factual metadata.

Different taxonomic systems can share common facts

A common nomenclatural resource allows different information systems to address different taxonomic issues, scopes, or user communities while sharing common reference data. Collaboration eliminates duplication, increases accountable attribution of work, and provides a common interchange core. A contributor to NameBank ca

We seek to establish that such an approach is technically sound and can reduce inefficient duplication and derivation of established facts while promoting a more effective attribution pathway that can increase the reach of the taxonomic profession without compromising quality. NameBank can also enhance interoperability between different infrastructures by providing a common address space.

The difference between a vocabulary and a taxonomy is that the latter organizes the terms in a hierarchical relationship.

-- Jack Krupansky