The International Plant Names Index: An Internet-Accessible Authority File of Scientific Names of Seed Plants Using Distributed Object Technologies

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*** The Harvard University Herbaria, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Australian National Herbarium have formed a consortium called the Plant Names Project (PNP), whose goal is to create and maintain a comprehensive authority file for the names of all seed plants (flowering plants and "gymnosperms"), and make this freely available on the Internet as the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). The PNP is developing the infra-structure to manage and edit data across continents, to keep these IPNI authority files continuously available and updated, and to provide transparent access to the large audience of scientists, citizens, and institutions who rely on these data. An NSF-funded pilot grant facilitated the development of a prototype Authority Data Server (ADS) system, a distributed object infrastructure implemented in Java, with current ADS nodes in Canberra (Australia), London (England), and Cambridge (U.S.A.). Under the current award, the investigators will modify and expand the pilot ADS system to include the approximately 1.4 million effectively published scientific names of seed plants now held in three separate databases at Harvard (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Kew (England), and Canberra (Australia). For historical and technological reasons, these have been available previously only in limited formats and at high cost to international users. Integration with other projects, such as the Biodiversity and Biological Collection Data Management (OZ) project at the University of Kansas, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) of the U.S. Bio-logical Information Infrastructure CNBII), and the TROPICOS database at the Missouri Botanical Garden will increase the utility of these data sources to an expanded group of users. Finally, using subsets of data from the Harvard Type Specimen Database, Tree- BASE, and other projects, the ADS system will be used to explore and demonstrate the applicability of a distributed- objects approach for the Internet d istribution of other types of data linked to names, such as prologues, type images, GIS data, and phylogenetic trees. ***