Presented at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group Annual Meeting
Indaiatuba, SP, Brasil
October 20, 2002
OpenKey: An Open Architecture for Sharing Plant Descriptions (Oct 17th)
OpenKey is a system to allow plant and other organism descriptions to the developed at independent institutions but shared through a central index. The data for the system is represented in three independent schema: the treatment description, independent character schema and image schema. Treatments are XML documents containing collections of references to character schema as well as taxonomic, natural history and other information. Character schema describe the properties of individual characteristics and may be used in any number of taxonomic descriptions distributed geographically. The collection of all character XML documents define both the vocabulary of character description for a collection and, through typing, the operations that can be performed over that vocabulary. Authors of treatments can select geographically distributed character elements to include in the identification/character section of a treatment. The final schema contains image and property right information about character state representation. OpenKey is a collaborative project between University of Illinois Herbarium, Graduate school of Library and Information Science, the Illinois Natural History Survey and the North Carolina Botanical Garden, and University of North Carolina, School of Information Studies. OpenKey is funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.