Phylotastic! Making tree-of-life knowledge accessible, reusable and convenient
Scientists rarely reuse expert knowledge of phylogeny, in spite of years of effort to assemble a great Tree of Life (ToL). A notable exception involves the use of Phylomatic, which provides tools to generate custom phylogenies from a large, pre-computed, expert phylogeny of plant taxa. This suggests great potential for a more generalized system that, starting with a query consisting of a list of any known species, would rectify non-standard names, identify expert phylogenies containing the implicated taxa, prune away unneeded parts, and supply branch lengths and annotations, resulting in a custom phylogeny suited to the users needs. Such a system could become a sustainable community resource if implemented as a distributed system of loosely coupled parts that interact through clearly defined interfaces.
phylogeny tree of life taxonomy hackathon web services data reuse