The Taxa Information Registry is a component of the Biogeographic Information System that provides routes to various lists of species of interest in our analytical work. This ScienceBase collection documents the routes and serves as a directory of the species lists or sources of taxa names of interest in our work. Each registered source is run through a set of living information assembly processes that consult various sources of related information to assemble data that we put behind our API for our own use and use by others. These are "living processes" in that they are repeated through time to produce new versions of information, and those changes in available information then drive other aspects of our information system. Each [...]
Summary
The Taxa Information Registry is a component of the Biogeographic Information System that provides routes to various lists of species of interest in our analytical work. This ScienceBase collection documents the routes and serves as a directory of the species lists or sources of taxa names of interest in our work. Each registered source is run through a set of living information assembly processes that consult various sources of related information to assemble data that we put behind our API for our own use and use by others. These are "living processes" in that they are repeated through time to produce new versions of information, and those changes in available information then drive other aspects of our information system.
Each logical list of taxon names is relatively unique in that the purpose for assembling the list and the people or groups involved all did so for various particular purposes. The context of a given list is therefore quite important in how the list is processed. We cannot assume that everyone consulted the same taxonomic source for identifying the species in their particular context. Each item in this registry, then, documents as much as we know about a given context so that we can use that metadata in TIR processing.
Items in the collection will provide either a described link to some online source where the list can be obtained or a stashed file that contains the list. The file may be provided directly by a source or may have involved some pre-processing before being placed with the registry item. In any case, the item will document the provenance to the best of our ability.
