HICLAS: An Effective Tool for Interoperability Among Taxonomic Database Systems

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HICLAS is biological classification data management system designed to store and retrieve taxonomic data about the relationships between species and other taxonomic levels. Classifications provide the bases for recording and tracking information of the tree of life; they are modified, tuned, improved and replaced as new information about the identity of species on the planet becomes available. A prototype WWW interface and home page for the database is available at: http:/aims.cps.msu.edu/hiclas. The focus of this project is to develop a software interface between the HICLAS system and other existing taxonomic databases. A set of interactive database interface tools will be built for data transfer, search and display. In order to establish interoperablity among various taxonomic database systems the databases that are currently available are classified into two categories. The first category of databases manages nomenclatural data with taxonomic hierarchy and associated taxon data including taxonomic history. The second category of databases manages dendrograms, especially phylogenetic trees, and related character-taxon data sets for cladistic and phenetic analyses. A generalized tree-comparison method and a user query system will be applied to compare classification trees with dendrograms gathered from different existing systems such as UC Berkeley's SMASCH (http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/smasch)and Harvard University's TreeBASE (http://www.herbaria.harvard.edu/treebase).