Prospects for a biodiversity grid: managing biodiversity knowledge

A wide variety of data has been collected by individuals and groups, for use in biodiversity-related scientific research. There is a need to be able to select and combine relevant biodiversity data, perhaps in ways the original creators did not envisage, and to use it in conjunction with other data such as climate data in order to perform analyses to answer important biodiversity questions. In this paper the author outlines the need for biodiversity e-Science problem solving environments underpinned by suitable grids, discussing what one might expect to characterise such a system, and identifying the kinds of problems that need to be solved in order to create a usable environment for biodiversity researchers. Techniques for data access and interoperability are discussed, drawing on experience in the BiodiversityWorld, BioDA and BUFFIE projects. These include the provision of an interoperation platform and the use of ontologies as a basis for determining data transformations. The author then concentrates on a very specific problem in biodiversity e-Science that needs to be addressed. This problem is the variation of opinion among experts which leads to conflicting ways of classifying, naming and describing organisms, and differing opinions about the reliability of other scientists' work. An early prototype created in order to explore these issues, myViews, is described. In this prototype it is possible, among other things, to transform data that reflects a given perspective into another that reflects the user's perspective. The author concludes by discussing the wider relevance of this work and, in particular, its relevance to the provision of metadata relating to biodiversity globally unique identifiers