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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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