Understanding the Global Names Architecture (GNA)
Channel: Association for Marine Exploration
Date: 2020-06-14

This video represents a presentation given by Richard L. Pyle on 27 March 2014 at the iDigBio workshop on Biological Digitization in the Pacific, held in Honolulu, 25-27 March 2014.  it summarizes the rationale behind GNA, including the main components (Global Names Index, or GNI and Global Names Usage Bank, or GNUB), and describes some of the powerful taxonomic services that GNA offers for reconciling taxonomic data.

Briefly, GNA represents a suite of services and database indexes that allow translation of text-string scientific names into unique identifiers that underpin special Taxon Name Usage (TNU) instances called "Protonyms", which are themselves cross-linked to other TNUs in a way that allows capturing nomenclatural information (including the information that underpins global nomenclators, such as ZooBank), Taxon Concept (Circumscription) information, and Classification (hierarchy) information. All of this information is anchored to static documentation (usually publications).