Collaborative Research: ABI: Innovation: The Global Names Architecture, an infrastructure for unifying taxonomic databases and services for managers of biological information.

海洋生物实验室（马萨诸塞州伍兹霍尔）、毕晓普博物馆（檀香山）、加州科学院（旧金山）和密苏里植物园（圣路易斯）获得了ABI创新奖，以建立全球名称体系结构（GNA），这是一套数据库、应用程序和语义网络服务的模块化套件，将有助于整合生命科学领域的信息。该项目将扩展现有的概念验证组件，探索技术挑战的替代解决方案，并将组件集成到试点GNA中。GNA利用了林奈的拉丁生物学名体系，这一体系一直是科学界最古老、最普遍的标准之一。实际上，生物学中的所有信息都是由进化及其产生的共享相似性的等级模式提供的。科学家们给物种命名，并随着对它们的进化和关系的了解的增加而改变它们。这些变化创造了一个错综复杂的同义词网络，加上同音异义和变体拼写，使得有效管理信息变得困难。GNA将创建一个系统，使我们能够在文献和在线数据集中正确翻译名称。虽然GNA对生命科学信息的长期管理有影响，但最初的受益者将是全世界一万多名分类学家，我们对世界生物多样性的理解依赖于他们的专业知识。一个学名“用法库”与生物多样性遗产图书馆的CiteBank相结合，将生成共享索引和分类文献的访问密钥，这些文献是我们对近200万个物种的大部分知识的来源。由真菌索引和国际动物命名委员会的ZooBank合作建立的新命名库将在注册时广播新发现。还有其他工具可以帮助分类学家合作建立地球的权威目录吗？GNA将把这一过程转变为一个语义网络基础设施，将不断增长的、可上网的地球生物圈知识组织起来。最终，NSF在生命科学领域的其他受资助者应该能够通过将他们的网站公开给将创建分类索引的服务来增强他们的数据管理计划。有关该项目的更多信息可从http://globalnames.org或dpatterson@mbl.edu获得。

The Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA), Bishop Museum (Honolulu), California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), and Missouri Botanical Gardens (St Louis) have received an ABI innovation award to establish the Global Names Architecture (GNA), a modular suite of databases, applications, and semantic web services that will help integrate information across the Life Sciences. The project will extend existing proof of concept components, explore alternative solutions for technical challenges, and integrate the components into a pilot GNA. The GNA capitalizes on Linnaeus' system of Latin scientific names for organisms, a system that has endured as one of the oldest and most universal standards in science. Virtually all information in biology is given context by evolution and the hierarchical pattern of shared similarities it has produced. Scientists name species and change them with growing knowledge about their evolution and relationships. These changes create a tangled network of synonyms that, along with homonyms and variant spellings, make it difficult to manage information effectively The GNA will create a system that enables us to translate names correctly across the literature and on-line datasets. While the GNA has implications for the long-term management of information in the life sciences, the initial beneficiaries will be the more than 10,000 taxonomists worldwide, on whose expertise our understanding of the world's biodiversity rests. A scientific name 'usage bank' coupled with the Biodiversity Heritage Library's CiteBank will generate shared indexes and access keys to the taxonomic literature, the source of most of our knowledge about nearly 2 million species. New nomenclatural registries founded by the co-operation of the Index Fungorum and the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature's ZooBank will broadcast new discoveries as they are registered. Other tools will help taxonomists collaborate to build authoritative catalogs of the Earth?s biodiversity, then merge and integrate them, a process that GNA will transform into a semantic cyberinfrastructure that will organize the growing, internet-accessible, knowledge of Earth's biosphere. Ultimately, other NSF grantees in the life sciences should be able to augment their Data Management Plans by exposing their web sites to services that will create taxonomic indices. More information about this project can be obtained from http://globalnames.org or dpatterson@mbl.edu.