State of WWBKB project

J.M. Vanel - 2003-03-05 (jmvanel@free.fr)

The application , a Flora of China search engine , runs on my personal machine (only 500MHz :-( ) . The server is up most of the time, but it's my development machine ...

The initial vision (1999) of the project is here :
http://wwbota.free.fr/call.htm

On the site http://wwbota.free.fr/ you will find complete informations on the project.

 
The search engine allows queries à La Google on the species description , and more generally on large XML databases. It allows to search character strings in specific organs or rubric (e.g. "flower:red leaf:large"). These simple  queries are then translated into XPath queries, then processed by the eXist XML database, and finally formatted through  Cocoon, an XML publication framework from Apache.org . It is 100% open source. It is managed by a community of developers on Sourceforge.net .
Upstream from that there is a syntaxic parser, FloraParse, writen in C++ with Lex &Yacc, which uses the WordNet semantic dictionary from Princeton University. FloraParse transforms Natural Language descriptions into an XML format where informations are marked as organs, sub-organ,  geography, etc.

All this is completely operational.
WWBKB is on some points ahead compared to the efforts of academical taxonomists. Collaborations include :

• Taxonomic Databases Working Group ( http://www.tdwg.org )
• Laboratoire Informatique et Systématique, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris)
• Havard University, which provided raw data from the  Flore of Chine
  

Jean-Marc Vanel
http://jmvanel.free.fr/

Worldwide Botanical Knowledge Base
http://wwbota.free.fr/