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

DELTA（Description Language for Taxonomy）是一种广泛使用的程序，用于管理分类学的形态数据。 分类学是生物学的一个基本部分，涉及地球生物群的分类。 对生物多样性的分类和理解依赖于良好的分类学。 DELTA多年来一直在发展，但也出现了反映可扩展性、数据格式一致性和缺乏用户友好性的问题。 DELTA将从头开始重新设计，具有现有系统的最佳功能，加上数据管理和功能的新功能。 社区已确定这些工具是分享分类特征信息所必需的。该软件将通过网络分发。 除了简化化石和活生物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.