Global or regional aggregators
Contents
"Taxonomic aggregators" - Categorisation in the TETTRIs context
Primary Target Aggregators
These are aggregators that offer comprehensive taxonomic coverage for a certain group of organisms, globally or with a European geographic coverage. As a role, they offer more in depth information compared to the other types of aggregators. They may contain data from literature, from smaller-scale aggregators or sometimes even original data. TETTRIs here focuses sites directly driven by the respective taxonomic community: For Fungi: Index Fungorum / Species Fungorum (IF). For vascular plants and bryophytes: World Flora Online Plant List (WFO) and for Europe, Euro+Med PlantBase. IF is also contributing to CoL and PESI, Euro+Med to PESI (and it will use WFO Name IDs), and WFO Plant List will in the future probably contribute to CoL, too. The question of identifying appropriate community datasets for animal groups and for Algae is being discussed. Species Fungorum and Euro+Med do not provide their own name matching services. However, since the CoL Services essentially are also covering ChecklistBank, versions of these datasets deposited in a standard format there can be accessed directly by singling them out as target datasets. Summary:
- Specific group of organisms, global (e.g. Index Fungorum) or regional (e.g. Euro+Med PlantBase).
- Content directly driven by and (also) used by the respective taxonomic community.
- Single classification of name usage, either as synonyms, accepted taxon names or for some reason unplaced names.
Secondary aggregators
These are aggregators that offer comprehensive taxonomic coverage of names and taxa irrespective of the taxonomic group, with either global (Catalogue of Life) or European (PESI/EU-nomen) geographic coverage. Their records are mostly contributed by secondary aggregators representing a certain taxonomic group. In contrast to "Lookup" aggregators, they provide a single classification of name usage, either as synonyms, accepted taxon names or for some reason unplaced names. Primary target aggregators are the principal components of the TETTRIs taxonomic backbone. TETTRIs focuses on Catalogue of Life and PESI/EU-nomen as a Secondary Target Aggregators. Summary:
- Comprehensive taxonomic coverage of names and taxa irrespective of the taxonomic group.
- Global (Catalogue of Life) or regional (e.g. European: PESI/EU-nomen).
- Single classification of name usage.
- Ideally, aggregating primary aggregators
"Lookup" target aggregators (Repositories)
These are services that provide access to a multitude of stored datasets, which may be updated or rather out-of-date. They are of interest for name discovery and to identify where a designation comes from. However, TETTRIs focusses here on GBIF Checklist Bank and on Global Names and both offer a service to match names against specific datasets – this essentially renders them (indirect) secondary target aggregators
- Provide access to a multitude of stored datasets, legacy or updated (e.g. GBIF/CoL Checklist Bank, GNA Global Names). Summary:
- Useful for name discovery and to trace provenance of designations
- If offering a service to match names against specific datasets they become (indirect) secondary or primary target aggregators
