New Tools for Managing Taxon- and Specimen-based Morphological Data

DELTA （Description Language for Taxonomy）是一个广泛使用的用于管理分类学形态学数据的程序。分类学是生物学的一个基本部分，涉及到地球生物群的分类。分类和理解生物多样性依赖于良好的分类学。DELTA经过多年的发展，但也出现了一些问题，反映了可伸缩性、数据格式一致性和缺乏用户友好性。DELTA将从零开始重新设计，具有当前系统的最佳功能以及数据管理和功能的新功能。这类工具已被学界认为是共享分类特征信息的必要工具。该软件将通过网络发布。除了简化化石和活的分类群形态数据的收集、标准化和分发之外，该软件还将成为系统学的教学工具。

DELTA (Description Language for Taxonomy) is a widely used program written to manage morphological data for taxonomy. Taxonomy is a basic part of biology, involving the classification of the Earth's biota. Cataloging and understanding biodiversity is dependent on good taxonomy. DELTA has grown through the years but has also developed problems reflecting scalability, data format consistency, and a lack of user-friendliness. DELTA will be reworked from scratch, with the best features of the present system plus new features of data management and functionality. Such tools have been identified by the community as necessary for sharing information about taxonomic characters. The software will be distributed through the web. In addition to streamlining the gathering, standardizing and distribution of morphological data on fossil and living taxa, the software will be a teaching tool for systematics.