Web-based taxonomy: Difference between revisions

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'''Web-based taxonomy''' is the effort by [[Taxonomy (biology)|taxonomists]] to use the [[World Wide Web]] in order to create unified, consensus taxonomies of life on Earth.

In his 2002 paper on the subject,<ref>[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v417/n6884/full/417017a.html Godfray, H.C.J (2002). Challenges for taxonomy. ''Nature'' 417: 17-19]</ref> [[H. Charles J. Godfray]] called for the creation of Web-based organizations to collect all the accumulated literature on a taxonomic group into a centralized knowledge base and make this data available through the Web as a unified taxonomy, so that it can be more easily examined and revised. Such a platform would be owned and maintained by a taxonomic working group, governed by an editor or an editorial board. An example of such a platform is [[FishBase]]. Many of these platforms contribute towards larger taxonomic efforts such as the [[Catalogue of Life]] (CoL), a meta-database of more than 150 species databases that catalog all living species on the planet.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Catalogue of Life - 2020-09-01 Beta : Source databases|url=http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/info/databases|access-date=2020-12-01|website=www.catalogueoflife.org}}</ref> The catalogue listed 1.64 million species for all kingdoms as of April 2016, claiming coverage of more than three quarters of the estimated species known to modern science.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Catalogue of Life - 2016 Annual Checklist : About the Catalogue of Life|url=http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2016/info/about|access-date=2020-12-01|website=www.catalogueoflife.org}}</ref> Taxonomies like the Catalogue of Life are used by research scientists, [[Citizen science|citizen scientists]], educators, and policy makers around the world.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Harmon|first=Joanie|date=2 December 2016|title="Animal, vegetable, data: Exploring the online 'Catalogue of Life'|work=UCLA News Room|url=https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/robert-montoya-catalogue-of-life|url-status=live|access-date=2020-12-01}}</ref>

The notion of Web-based consensus taxonomies remains controversial because, as two Australian researchers pointed out,<ref>{{cite journal | author = [[Kevin Thiele|Thiele, Kevin]] and David Yeates | year = 2002 | title = Tension arises from duality at the heart of taxonomy | journal = Nature | issue = 6905| doi = 10.1038/419337a | pages = 337 | volume = 419 | pmid = 12353005| doi-access = free }}</ref> taxonomic names are not fixed but hypotheses, and therefore in constant change.