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…

This contribution explores the problem of recognizing and measuring the universe of specimen-level data existing in Natural History Collections around the world, in absence of a complete, world-wide census or register. Estimates of size seem necessary to plan for resource…

The Audubon Core Multimedia Resource Metadata Schema is a representation-free vocabulary for the description of biodiversity multimedia resources and collections, now in the final stages as a proposed Biodiversity Informatics Standards (TDWG) standard. By defining only six terms as mandatory,…

With the establishment of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2001 as an inter-governmental co-ordinating body, concerted efforts were made during the past decade to establish a global research infrastructure to facilitate the sharing, discovery and access to primary…

A strong case has been made for freely available, high quality data on species occurrence, in order to track changes in biodiversity. However, one of the main issues surrounding the provision of such data is that sources vary in quality,…

Place prioritization for biodiversity representation is essential for conservation planning, particularly in megadiverse countries where high deforestation threatens biodiversity. Given the collecting biases and uneven sampling of biological inventories, there is a need to develop robust models of species’ distributions.…

We address a poorly understood aspect of ecological niche modeling: its sensitivity to different levels of geographic uncertainty in organism occurrence data. Our primary interest was to assess how accuracy degrades under increasing uncertainty, with performance measured indirectly through model…