1. The Library of Life Federated Description Services and the Library of Life or What can we do with SDD anyway? Kevin Thiele Centre for Biological Information Technology The University of Queensland k.thiele@cbit.uq.edu.au www.lucidcentral.com TDWG Lisbon 2003

2. The Library of Life The real world (‘The Field’) Taxonomic concepts (species, genera etc) Increasing abstraction Phylogenetic Relationships (cladograms)

3. The Library of Life The real world (‘The Field’) Taxonomic concepts (species, genera etc) “Maps” – field guides, Floras, monographs etc

4. The Library of Life The real world (‘The Field’) Specimen databases ? Names Services “The Tree of Life”

5. The Library of Life XML Schema, defines instance documents that can represent descriptive information for classes (e.g. taxa), objects (e.g. specimens) and/or descriptors (characters and states) What is SDD? An SDD instance document, may have any or all of the following: document metadata character list (in multiple languages and for multiple audiences) character hierarchies class (e.g. taxon) list class (e.g. taxon) hierarchy fully or partially marked-up natural-language descriptions coded descriptions resources (e.g. glossary entries, images, notes, reference lists etc) raw observation data sets

6. The Library of Life Lossless exchange and round-tripping between applications Lossless transforms between coded and natural-language descriptions Full rendering of one description into multiple languages for multiple audiences Sharing of e.g. character resources collaborative projects bottom-up development of agreed descriptor sets Collate new descriptions from sets of existing descriptions Compare and/or merge descriptions Serve descriptions from description databases Federate description services What can we do with SDD instance documents?

7. The Library of Life Lucid InXight markup SDD Import Merge SDD Collate SDD Compare SDD Update Lucid Export Names Service Query e.g. Tree of Life Query Delta Exchange Translate Some possible transforms and operations on SDD instance documents

8. The Library of Life 1.Any new taxon will be described once and only once 2.Descriptions will be modified, not re-authored 3.Descriptions will be made using flexibly shared descriptors 4.Published Floras etc will be replaced by just-in-time delivery of tailored descriptions and keys 5.Published monographs will become date-stamped works-in- progress 6.The global community of taxonomists will contribute to a global Library of Life New business rules for SDD taxonomy?