期刊名称：Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science
出版年度：2011
卷号：37
期号：4
出版社：American Society for Information Science and Technology
摘要：Classifying the diversity of life on earth, as well as collecting specimens of the living world to document it, are old endeavors. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus first published his seminal work Systema Naturae, which established the binomial nomenclature of living things still valid to this day, in 1735. Long before digital record-keeping was invented, generations of naturalists, including Linnaeus himself, collected specimens, archived them for perpetuity in natural history museums around the world and painstakingly described in natural language what they had found and where. According to recent estimates [1], the world’s natural history museums hold an estimated three billion museum specimens, most with no digital record of any kind. Until only a few years ago, the digital records that had been created were not accessible from outside the institutions that kept them. Thus, so far most of the efforts in developing knowledge organization systems (KOS) for biodiversity have focused on digitally mobilizing the most fundamental data on biodiversity, such as which species has been observed where and when. By contrast, other fields of biology, for example those concerned with investigating genetic model organisms (such as mouse and fruitfly) and human disease, have continuously been at the forefront of building and applying knowledge discovery-oriented KOS.
