Abstract. - Kinds of occurrences (evidence of particular living organisms) can be grouped by common data and metadata characteristics that are determined by the way that the occurrence represents the organism. The creation of occurrence resources follows a pattern which…

Many methods used for estimating species richness are either difficult to use on poorly known taxa or require input data that are laborious and expensive to collect. In this paper we apply a method which takes advantage of the carefully…

The prospects of integrating full-blown biological taxonomies into an ontological reasoning framework are critically reviewed. The common usage of a static 'snapshot' hierarchy in ontological representations of taxonomy is contrasted with a more realistic situation that involves dynamic, piece-meal revisions…

Online biodiversity portals and databases enabling access to large volumes of biological information represent a potentially extensive set of resources for a variety of user groups. However, in order for these resources to live up to their promise they need…

Comprehensive biodiversity surveys are unavailable for most Central and Eastern European countries. Although birds in general are well-studied, distributional information in the region is sparse and largely out-of of-date; I used museum specimen locality records and raster GIS data layers…

Large numbers of legacy taxonomic publications are currently being digitized to make them online available and ready for full text search. The documents are being marked up with XML for two purposes: To preserve the document structure, and to facilitate…

We comment on the inherited legacy, current state of, and future direction of the management of biodiversity information in natural history museums in South Africa. We emphasise the importance of training and capacity development to improve the quality and integration…

Access to digitised specimen data is a vital means to distribute information and in turn create knowledge. Pooling the accessibility of specimen and observation data under common standards and harnessing the power of distributed datasets places more and more information…

Natural history collections represent a vast repository of biodiversity data of international significance. There is an imperative to capture the data through digitisation projects in order to expose the data to new and established users of biodiversity data. On the…

Natural science collections comprise a small component of a more extensive source of data on which questions about the natural world may be addressed. However, NHC data offer, when digitised, an exceptional resource: within collections lies the most extensive dataset…