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Antbase.org
- gateway to ants online
Retrieving
information on the systematics of ants is becoming increasingly
simple. Whereas so far everybody interested in any aspect of ant
taxonomy or systematics had to spent weeks and months in building
up a list of the species, to copy the necessary publications from
ca 3,500 publications covering only the taxonomic history, not to
speak the ca 8,500 covering all aspects of ant taxonomy, which are
published in over 500 different journals and 100 books, this is
now becoming accessible on the click of a mouse button.
Antbase
is providing this service, that is an individual page to each taxon
described. It is based on the complete, continually updated list
of all ants of the worlds and its synonyms (>11,000 valid species
vs. 18,000 described names as of January 2002), links to georeferenced
specimen records, online full text publications, imagery and continually
updated links to other important data repositories such as GenBank
or Formis.
So
far, 800 publications are online comprising ca 20,000 pages of
online
literature. The publications can either be downloaded as entire
pdf documents, or as single page pdf's, which are directly accessed
from within the citations of the ant name server. Funding has
been
secured through the Atherton Seidal Foundation (Smithsonian Institution)
to add another 2,500 publications, thus covering all the systematics
publications for which we get the permissions from publishers
and
authors to make them accessible online. With some minor exceptions,
though with a tremendous impact regarding the number of modern
species
treatments affected, they are obtained.
Pdf
documents based on scanned documents are like xerox-copies, and
thus can't be searched, since they aren't machine readable. Thus
having missing publications wouldn't be so serious. However,
with
the advent of mark up languages such as XML, all the taxonomic
descriptions can be turned into little databases, from which,
with the necessary
tools, data can be extracted or mined. This, for example, will
allow one to find all 'red ants in Costa Rica', to explore other
relationships
hidden within the tens of thousands of pages already published
on ants.
Antbase,
in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History, the
University of Massachusetts, the Ohio State University, the University
of Magdeburg, and the advice of colleagues from the South African
Museum, Cape Town, the Zoological Museum of the University of São
Paulo and the California Academy of Sciences is developing a mark
up schema and a set of tools to extract exactly this information.
Having
those tools at all our fingertips will enhance the efficiency
in
our day to day operations. Already now, up to over 200,000 people
visit the pages of antbase per month, not to speak of all the
searches
and downloads of publications done.
All
the data sources are referenced. The taxonomic data is part of
the
Hymenoptera Name Server at Ohio State University which currently
includes 110,000 Hymenoptera species names, of which 11,000 are
ants. The baseline ant data is based on Bolton's Catalogue, and
after the 1994 cut-off date is continually entered from original
publications. These are in most cases sent to antbase, which
also,
given the permissions, makes them at the same time online accessible.
Antbase
is supported by the conservation efforts of the International
Union
for the Study of Social Insects and the Social Insects Specialists
Group of the Species Survival Commission of the World's Conservation
Union (IUCN), and the database is endorsed by the International
Society of Hymenopterists. It is housed at the American Museum
of
Natural History and the Ohio State University, and day to day work
is done by Donat Agosti and Norman F. Johnson. Longterm storage
of the databases and files is guaranteed by the American Museum
of Natural History.
Antbase,
through the Hymenoptera Name Server, is the ant taxonomic data
provider
for the North American Integrated Taxonomic Information System
ITIS, Species 2000, the ALL species tool box, and the Global
Biodiversity
Information System (GBIF).
Data
input is either through external funding or volunteers. In order
to advance and make ants the best-documented taxon in the digital
realm we need your support. This can be by simply giving us the
permission to add your publications to the list of those online
accessible, to make your research data online accessible so that
links can be made to preparing data bases covering specific topics,
such as on ant mutualisms, literature covering specific topics
such
as leaf cutter ants etc.
Thus,
please feel free to contact either Donat Agosti (agosti@amnh.org)
or Norman F. Johnson (johnson.2@osu.edu)
to arrange your input.
Donat Agosti
Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian
Institution
agosti@amnh.org
Norman F. Johnson
Director, Insect Collection, Ohio State University
Johnson.2@osu.edu
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