Collaborative Research: ABI Development: An open infrastructure to disseminate phylogenetic knowledge

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Because phylogenies (trees) showing the evolutionary relationships of species are so useful in bioscience and biotechnology, there has been a major worldwide effort to determine trees for various groups of organisms. This information can be knitted together into a single "Tree of Life" (ToL) covering millions of species, though it is often better to think of expert ToL knowledge as a forest of overlapping source-trees. Because this body of knowledge is complex, rapidly changing, and distributed among many online resources, getting the latest knowledge is a challenge. The focus of this project is to get ToL knowledge into the hands of scientists, educators, and the public, by building a distributed system of internet services that work together with existing NSF-sponsored projects to deliver custom trees to users as quickly and easily as they currently get online driving directions. The resulting system will allow a greater range of life-sciences researchers to ask more complex and challenging questions relating to diversity and biological functions. The project will work directly with educators and with educational resources such as the Encyclopedia of Life, making it easy for millions of users to access the latest scientific knowledge of species relationships. Phylogenetic trees are useful in all areas of biology, both to organize knowledge by guiding classification and for process-based models that allow scientists to make robust inferences from comparisons of evolved entities (genes, species, etc). Phylogenetic knowledge is disseminated today via a very large number of idiosyncratic pathways, most of which are not easily traceable. While experts continue expanding the Tree of Life (ToL) knowledge, addressing gaps and conflicts, our focus is on dissemination, putting ToL knowledge in the hands of researchers, educators, and the public. The goal of this project is to design and develop an open web-service architecture for ToL delivery, with the functionality necessary to integrate into scientific workflows, including name-resolution, tree discovery, subtree extraction, and scaling of trees. The architecture will be designed as a sustainable distributed collection of services and will rely on semantically rich descriptions to facilitate composition of services and to documents the tree discovery and reuse process. The project will cultivate this system as a community resource by (1) involving partners, domain experts, and a broader phyloinformatics community in the design process; (2) partnering with other projects to involve them as service-providers or consumers; (3) developing innovative clients demonstrating quantitatively important use-cases; (4) staging a hackathon for participants to add services or develop clients. Results of the project will be accessible via www.phylotastic.org.