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How far you are
Answer. Each subproject's status is indicated
between [].
What would be the next step
Parse the most easily accessible piece of data, either Flora of China,
or Flora of Australia, put it on a web server with an ergonomic GUI, images,
and HTTP requests to other biological sites.
Brave GNU World standard questions
* What is it?
Answer.
* Who would use it?
Botanists, particularly field botanists, and every layman who wants to
identify a plant specimen and get acurate information about the species.
By popular demand, we will include mushrooms.
* Why would they use it instead of similar projects?
Although biologists have been working on formalized taxonomy for more than
20 years, there is no other project (I'd be happy to be wrong!) having
this scope of providing:
-
exhaustivity in covering of species
-
specimen identification including image recognition
-
distributed database and semantic web techniques
* Special features/strengths?
-
use of W3C's open formats and protocols (XML, HTTP), and free software
-
use of existing resources: texts, particularly standard Floras
* Special problems?
We need funding, we need people.
* Who is working on it?
Alas, almost only me
for now.
* Plans for the close and distant future?
Answer.
* Interesting/fun stories that might juice up the story?
Botany is a leader project with "just" 250 000 species. The same techniques
will apply to Zoology (about 1 000 000 species just for insects). Moreover,
with RDF or other techniques we'll
be able to express ecological links between species, e.g. "Aglais urticae's
(a butterfly) caterpillar eats Urtica dioica (nettle)".
* License?!
GPL for software, and for data (the main part) similar license, maybe the
Open Content License.