Metadata for Plant Seeds: Taxonomy, Standards, Issues, and Impact

Introduction It is an interesting time to be looking at metadata about plant seeds: a growing awareness of the importance of biodiversity has brought international attention to seed collecting, saving, and information sharing. At the same time, scientists are continually learning more about seeds at the most basic biological level, and this new knowledge is raising questions about the taxonomic systems scientists have used since the 1700s. Contemporary seed metadata is a complex and diverse area for study. This paper is divided into four sections. First, it will begin by looking at the taxonomic systems employed by botanists and discussing current trends and issues in that area of seed metadata. Second, the most prominent seed metadata standards will be examined. Third, the emerging field of bioinformatics will be addressed, and finally the impact of biodiversity impact on seed metadata will be explored by looking at the major seed collecting and saving organizations and projects. Throughout this paper the focus is on seed metadata, but that cannot be separated from issues in the world of botanical metadata in general. Taxonomy Biological life, including seeds, has been classified using the Linnaean system since the mid-1700s. This classic taxonomic system forms our fundamental understanding of how the biological world is organized and is a model for other forms of taxonomy. To be clear, taxonomic data is a form of metadata. Botanists debate taxonomic classifications--whether a specific species is appropriately identified and classified--and much of the taxonomic literature is about these issues (Stevens, 2003), but it is the larger taxonomic system and how it relates to metadata that concerns this paper. Linnaean taxonomy is in some way a model metadata standard: it is extensible, is the universal biological standard, and it has an agreed upon processes for proposing, revising, citing, and formalizing data changes (Godfray, Clark, Kitching, Mayo, & Scoble, 2007). Begun in the mid-1700s by Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), it has been revised and updated many times. It divides biological world into the familiar system of kingdoms and ranks, and includes the familiar binomial nomenclature, which uses the genus name and the specific name to form the species name (Minelli, 2005). Botanical nomenclature is governed by International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) (International Association for Plant Taxonomy, 2000). The ICBN is maintained and published by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, an international association of scientists (International Association for Plant Taxonomy, 2007). The acceptance of Linnaean taxonomy means that botanists have a good start toward interoperability, but Linnaean taxonomy does not provide one key to interoperability: unique identifiers (Godfray et al., 2007). Using the Linnaean taxonomic system, different species can have identical names, which means that it is impossible to identify data in a way that is explicit and machine-readable. One prominent remedy is the proposed Life Sciences Identifiers (LSID). LSIDs are being championed across the biological sciences. The system uses the construction of a Universal Resource Name (URN) using an authority name space ID, object ID, and authority ID (Smith & Szekely, 2005). LSIDs have their own resolution protocol and they "are persistent, global and location-independent object names" (Clark, Martin, & Liefeld, 2003). There has been some criticism of LSIDs based on their potential conflicts with other forms of internet protocol (NeuroCommons, 2008), but they are widely used. It is important to note that LSIDs are not a replacement for biological names since LSIDs are only for electronic resources (Huber & Klump, 2008), but that does not detract for their importance to metadata interoperability. Metadata Standards In addition to taxonomic metadata standards, there are a variety of other metadata projects and standards relevant to seeds. …