The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant), a virtual organization funded by the National Science Foundation with a large team located at the University of Arizonas (UA) BIO5 Institute, today announced the release of the third iteration of its web-based Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS which you can access here:
tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org. The TNRS allows researchers and the public to confidently use and share the worlds vast botanical diversity data by resolving names to a scientifically accepted standard. The first version of TNRS was originally launched one year ago as an innovative, yet simple, tool that allows anyone- from a seasoned laboratory biologist to a retired Master Gardener- to quickly standardize plant names against trusted taxonomic sources. It was built by a unique collaboration of computer scientists, botanists, and biologists from iPlant, the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN), the Missouri Botanical Garden, and others to tackle what had been an insurmountable computational challenge in biology. The most important feature of the 3.0 release is the ability to hierarchically resolve names against multiple taxonomic sources. Four taxonomic sources are now available: Tropicos®, The National Center for Biotechnology Informations (NCBI) Taxonomy Database, The United States Department of Agricultures (USDA) Plants Database, and The Global Compositae Checklist. With the addition of the new taxonomic name sources, the TNRS has expanded the geographic range of plant species names it can resolve far beyond the Americas. The plant species available for comparison will continue to grow as the botany community contributes additional sources of names. The TNRS resolves lists of plant names, often containing thousands of names, by passing them through a process of exact matching, parsing to break names into their component parts and fuzzy matching to search for near matches. Users now have the ability to select one or more of the four taxonomic sources for name comparison. Ecologists studying the changes in the geographical distribution of plants in the sunflower family will most likely standardize names using the Global Compositae Checklist, while plant scientists studying the impact of climate change on growing zones of crops in the US are likely to use the USDA Plants Database. Members of the botany community are invited to contact iPlant about contributing their taxonomic sources to the TNRS. The TNRS source code has been released with an open source license and developers are encouraged to expand it to resolve taxonomic names of other groups of organisms.
