TDWG 2020 Avenues into integration: communicating taxonomic intelligence  sender to recipient - PD01
Channel: Biodiversity Information Standards TDWG
Date: 2020-11-02

“What is crucial for your ability to communicate with me... pivots on the recipient’s capacity to interpret–to make good inferential sense of the meanings that the declarer is able to send.” (Rescher 2000, 148)

Conventional approaches to reconciling taxonomic information in biodiversity databases have been predominantly based on string matching for unique taxonomic name combinations (e.g., 'Genus species'). However, in their original context these names pertain to specific usages or taxonomic concepts, which can vary in meaning for the same name according to different sources and usages. "Taxonomic intelligence" is the ability and challenge to adequately represent and propagate this complex name/usage interaction within and across trusted biodiversity data networks. New approaches are making progress on key obstacles. An important critique of proposals to use name-to-concept relationships for data aggregation has been the difficulty of scaling them up to reach comprehensive coverage. However, growing efforts by medium-scale data providers and taxonomic authorities suggest an all-or-nothing approach is not required. Nonetheless, with multiple parallel efforts in this domain come potential problems for coordination — how do we ensure that senders and recipients of biodiversity data not only can share messages but do so with “good inferential sense” of their respective meanings? Here we aim to provide a space for brief reviews of diverse, ongoing initiatives in biodiversity AI, logical reasoning, and geospatial analysis to implement taxonomic intelligence. This will set the stage for discussing practical challenges, including reaching broader coverage for name-to-concept alignments, the leveraging of museum specimen metadata, and novel computational tools.

- Introduction: Sterner BW, Upham N, Sen A, Franz NM (2020) Avenues into Integration: Communicating taxonomic intelligence from sender to recipient. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59006. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59006

- Vaidya G, Lapp H, Cellinese N (2020) Enabling Machines to Integrate Biodiversity Data with Evolutionary Knowledge. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59088. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59088

- Chapman AR, Harman K, Le Breton S, Grzywna J (2020) Automated Validation of Biological Names in Environmental Survey and Impact Assessments. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59345. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59345

- Frances AL, Oliver L, Goodin K (2020) Conservation Implications of Taxonomic Intelligence: A case study of Trillium. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59229. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59229
2:10 UTC Sen A, Franz N, Sterner BW, Upham N (2020) The Automated Taxonomic Concept Reasoner. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59074. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59074

- Franz NM, Sterner BW, Upham NS, Cortés Hernández KA (2020) Redesigning the Trading Zone between Systematics and Conservation: Insights from Malagasy mouse lemur classifications, 1982 to present. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59234. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59234

Discussion. Additional panelists: Katja Schulz, Cam Webb, Johan Liljeblad, Anne Fuchs, Nico Franz, Jeff Gerbracht, and Jonathan Rees.