17 research outputs found
A decade of the World Register of Marine Species – General insights and experiences from the Data Management Team: Where are we, what have we learned and how can we continue? - Fig 6
No full textPlanned usage (A) and application (B) of WoRMS data by data request applicants since 2007 showing that the majority of use cases are relate to scientific research where WoRMS data either forms the taxonomic backbone of research databases or a tool for data quality control.</p
Marine Species Traits in the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone
No full textDescribing species patterns and their underlying processes are essential to assessing the status and future evolution of marine ecosystems. This effort requires biological information on functional and structural species traits, such as feeding ecology, body size, reproduction, and life history.
Basic trait information was already available within the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), for a limited number of taxa:
Biological and ecological traits (e.g., body size, feeding type)
Taxonomic traits (e.g., paraphyletic groups)
Human-defined traits (e.g., Red List species)
Within the EMODnet Biology project and the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone, this initiative was taken one step further, and ten traits were prioritized to document: taxonomy, environment, geography, depth, body size, substratum, mobility, skeleton, diet, and reproduction.
Criteria for selecting these traits were: applicability to most taxa, easy availability, and the fact that their inclusion would result in new research and/or management applications.
Taxonomy- and environment-related information are available within WoRMS, whereas geography data are available through the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS).
During 2018, the skeleton information was added to WoRMS. Currently, almost 4,000 accepted marine species have information regarding their supporting structure, enclosures, and composition.
Body size information wascollected for distinct (taxonomic) groups, which resulted in more than 6,000 accepted marine species having quantitative body size information included in WoRMS. An ongoing traits data mining exercise is combining body size with benthos-plankton information, extracted both from WoRMS and the European Ocean Biogeographic Information System (EurOBIS), to assign functional groups such as macrobenthos, microplankton, etc. to the taxa in WoRMS.
All trait information collected in WoRMS is made available through a dedicated thematic traits portal
The LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone: Connecting information on taxonomy, biogeography, literature, traits and genomics
No full textThe Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) is responsible for the set-up of the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone (LW-TaxBB), as a central part of the European LifeWatch Infrastructure. The LW-TaxBB aims to (virtually) bring together different component databases and data systems, all of them related to taxonomy, biogeography, ecology, genetics and literature. By doing so, the LW-TaxBB standardises species data and integrates biodiversity data from different repositories and operating facilities and is the driving force behind the species information services of the Belgian LifeWatch.be e-Lab and the Marine Virtual Research Environment that are being developed.
The mission of LifeWatch is to advance biodiversity research and to provide major contributions to address the big environmental challenges, such as knowledge-based solutions for environmental managers in the field of conservation or dealing with long-standing ecological questions that could so far not be addressed due to a lack of data or a lack of good and easy access to data. This is being achieved by giving access to data and information through a single infrastructure which (virtually) brings together a large range and variety of datasets, services and tools. Scientists can use these tools and services to construct so-called Virtual Research Environments (VREs), where they are able to address specific questions related to biodiversity research, including e.g. topics related to conservation. They are not only offered an environment with unlimited computer and data storage capacity, but there is also transparency at all stages of the research process and the generic application of the e-infrastructure opens the door towards more inter- and multidisciplinary research.
The LW-TaxBB – virtually - brings together different component databases and data systems, dealing with five major components: (1) taxonomy, through regional, national, European, global and thematic databases, (2) biogeography, based on databases dealing with species occurrences, (3) ecology, in the form of species-specific traits, (4) genetics and (5) literature, by linking all available information to the relevant sources and through tools that can intelligently search this literature.
The LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone is a two-way street: besides using the tools and functionalities it is offering – which are often developed based on identified needs within the scientific community -, scientists can also contribute themselves to make it more complete. Feedback on all available data and information (e.g. taxonomy and traits) is highly appreciated and communicated with the experts involved in the different component databases. All distribution information collected by individual scientists can become part of the biogeographic component of this backbone, by contributing occurrence data to the system.
Through the LW-TaxBB, users benefit in several ways, amongst others by:
Easy access to data and information to a variety of resources
The opportunity to quality control their own data, by cross-checking with data available through the LW-TaXBB
Free and easy access to a wide range of data services and web services
Possibility to combine available services into workflows, and link several systems together
Major components of the LW-TaxBB are – amongst others - the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and the European node of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (EurOBIS). WoRMS is an authoritative classification and catalogue of marine names currently containing 233,275 accepted marine species. EurOBIS publishes distribution data on marine species, collected within European marine waters or collected by European researchers outside European marine waters and currently contains 24.8 million distribution records. Both these systems have a strong link and collaboration agreements with international initiatives such as e.g. the Catalogue of Life (CoL), the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) and the Global Biodiversity Information System (GBIF) and aim to collaborate with other ESFRIs such as DiSSCO and ELIXIR
10 years of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS): where do we stand & where are we heading?
No full textThe World Register of Marine Species aims to provide the most authoritative list of names of all marine species, ever published through a freely available online portal.
In 2017, WoRMS celebrated its 10th anniversary. This was an excellent opportunity to both look backward and forward, by analyzing how the system has grown, how it is used and how it can be improved in the future.
Although there are more than 240,000 accepted marine species available through WoRMS, an analysis of editor activity shows that there are still many species names missing from the system, and that this does not only concern recently published species. Each year, an average of 38,000 marine species names are added to WoRMS – compared to the on average 2000 newly described marine species per year.
An actively collaborating editor community and Data Management Team are indispensable in keeping a database like WoRMS alive, and mean that WoRMS is now regarded as the standard marine species taxonomic backbone for numerous other initiative such as NCBI Genbank, BOLD, CoL, EOL, GBIF and OBIS. Funding to keep WoRMS going currently is provided through the LifeWatch project. WoRMS constitutes a major contribution to the LifeWatch Taxonomic Backbone.</jats:p
Technological roadmap on AI planning and scheduling
No full textAt the beginning of the new century, Information Technologies had become basic and indispensable
constituents of the production and preparation processes for all kinds of goods and services and
with that are largely influencing both the working and private life of nearly every citizen. This
development will continue and even further grow with the continually increasing use of the Internet
in production, business, science, education, and everyday societal and private undertaking.
Recent years have shown, however, that a dramatic enhancement of software capabilities is required,
when aiming to continuously provide advanced and competitive products and services in all these
fast developing sectors. It includes the development of intelligent systems – systems that are more
autonomous, flexible, and robust than today’s conventional software.
Intelligent Planning and Scheduling is a key enabling technology for intelligent systems. It has
been developed and matured over the last three decades and has successfully been employed for a
variety of applications in commerce, industry, education, medicine, public transport, defense, and
government.
This document reviews the state-of-the-art in key application and technical areas of Intelligent Planning
and Scheduling. It identifies the most important research, development, and technology transfer
efforts required in the coming 3 to 10 years and shows the way forward to meet these challenges in
the short-, medium- and longer-term future.
The roadmap has been developed under the regime of PLANET – the European Network of Excellence
in AI Planning. This network, established by the European Commission in 1998, is the co-ordinating
framework for research, development, and technology transfer in the field of Intelligent Planning and
Scheduling in Europe.
A large number of people have contributed to this document including the members of PLANET non-
European international experts, and a number of independent expert peer reviewers. All of them are
acknowledged in a separate section of this document.
Intelligent Planning and Scheduling is a far-reaching technology. Accepting the challenges and progressing
along the directions pointed out in this roadmap will enable a new generation of intelligent
application systems in a wide variety of industrial, commercial, public, and private sectors
Temporal and institutional distribution of data requests received.
No full textA: stacked bar chart showing number of data request per year starting in 2005. Requests for ERMS data are shown grey colour, those for WoRMS data in turquoise.; B: pie chart shows in terms of percentage which type of organisations request WoRMS downloads.</p
The absolute number of files matched per year on the left Y-axis, and cumulative number of files matched through the WoRMS taxon match tool since its launch in 2007 (right Y-axis).
No full textThe absolute number of files matched per year on the left Y-axis, and cumulative number of files matched through the WoRMS taxon match tool since its launch in 2007 (right Y-axis).</p
Usage of WoRMS data downloads by different nations: number of requests received since 2007 and percentage of total requests since 2007 (n = 185).
No full textCountry abbreviations following the ISO 3166–1 alpha-3 code. Map based on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-WorldSICN.svg created by Gap5200 and released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.</p
Compilation graph with the evolution in page views, hits, unique visitors, visits and terabytes of bandwidth for the website of the World Register of Marine Species.
No full textCompilation graph with the evolution in page views, hits, unique visitors, visits and terabytes of bandwidth for the website of the World Register of Marine Species.</p
