Abstract
The Aphia platform is an infrastructure designed to capture taxonomic and related data and information, and includes an online editing environment. The latter allows easy access to experts so they can update the content of the database in a timely fashion. Aphia is the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and its more than 80 related global, regional and thematic species databases, but it also allows the storage of non-marine data. The content of Aphia can be consulted online, either by individual users or via machine-to-machine interactions. Aphia uses unique and stable identifiers for each available name in the database through the use of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs). The system not only allows the storage of accepted and unaccepted names, but it also documents the relationships between names. This makes it a very powerful tool for taxonomic quality control, and also allows the linking of different pieces of information through scientific names, both within the Aphia platform and in relation to externally hosted databases. Through these LSIDs, Aphia has become an important player in the field of (marine) biodiversity informatics, allowing interactions between its own taxonomic data and e.g., biogeographic databases. Some applications in the field of biodiversity informatics encompass the coupling of species traits and taxonomy, as well as the creation of diverse, expert validated data products that can be used by policy makers, for example. Aphia also supplies (part of) its content to other data integrators and the infrastructure can be used to host orphan databases in danger of being lost.
Highlights
Ever since the rise of the World Wide Web, databases have been made available online to offer people easy access to data from anywhere at any time
Biodiversity informatics came to life, stressing the importance of getting biodiversity into the digital era and—more importantly—to ensure interoperability among the variety of existing biodiversity-related databases, offering scientists the opportunity to get easy access to data and allowing them to tackle overarching biodiversity-related questions [1,3,6,7,8]
The deep links are based on a linkage between the AphiaID and the corresponding ID in another data system, e.g., Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) [5], AlgaeBase [15], Information System (ITIS) [14] and the molecular databases hosted at the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI) [47]
Summary
Ever since the rise of the World Wide Web, databases have been made available online to offer people easy access to data from anywhere at any time. —15 years later—it can be seen as a mature, dynamic and interoperable taxonomically-oriented data platform that allows easy access and continuous online management of taxonomic information by a worldwide team of experts—the taxonomic and thematic editors of World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and. Aphia has kept track of the latest developments and needs in the field of biodiversity and biodiversity informatics: through awareness of the growing importance of linking taxonomic information with literature, specimen information, ecological traits and basic species distribution data. Its relationship with other large data systems and projects will be explained to demonstrate how it has contributed to the field of biodiversity informatics
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