Re: [Treebase-devel] current best practices for publishing trees electronically

[Rutger V. <rut...@gm...>]

> We'd appreciate your help in making sure that we are making the best
> use of TreeBase and any other technologies that you might recommend
> for making trees available electronically.   At the TDWG meeting,
> several of us experimented with the TreeBase submission process.  We
> were impressed with the support for representing the 3 kinds of
> linkable quantities that we targeted in our assessment: species names
> (or LSIDs or other taxonomic identifiers), accession numbers, and
> geographic coordinates.  The only weakness we have noticed so far is
> the lack of access to all of these data though treebase interfaces.

Looking at what you have up on the wiki, it looks like you are hitting
the right buttons, i.e. you are making the best use of TreeBASE.
W.r.t. access to the metada (e.g. DwC coordinates, accession numbers)
the way forward would be a two-step process:

1. the CQL query interface would need to be re-designed/expanded such
that more predicates are recognized and supported for searching.
Whether this would be on a predicate-by-predicate basis or something
more generic remains to be seen. Hopefully the latter, but it's not
immediately obvious to me how that would work.

2. a simple search box (a bit like the clever entrez search (Rod Page
has been begging for this)) would need to be developed that knows how
to construct any relevant CQL search queries and call them, returning
all hits from the different search sections. I have some ideas for how
to do this, but it wouldn't be trivial.

In any case, thanks for pointing out these weaknesses. They should be
resolved, and they are resolvable in principle :)

Rutger

-- 
Dr. Rutger A. Vos
School of Biological Sciences
Philip Lyle Building, Level 4
University of Reading
Reading
RG6 6BX
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 118 378 7535
http://www.nexml.org
http://rutgervos.blogspot.com