BioTaggingImages - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Biotagging our plant pictures

For the Interactive University's City|Watershed Project, Doug Kern has uploaded over 1700 pictures of plants to his Flickr account. It seems that they are all tagged with genus/species information, which represents a substantial amount of detailed work. Currently, it is unclear which tags correspond to the genus and which to the species. For the pictures have been placed in sets labeled for the genus and species, it is possible to distinguish the genus from the species.

I am considering indicating more specifically the genus and species information by tagging plant pictures with tags like bio:genus and bio:species (e.g., bio:genus=Spartina bio:species=foliosa) Such tagging is akin to the use of geo:lon and geo:lat in the recent geotagging craze in Flickr. Hopefully, before there is massive amount of tagging, I'd want to do a careful study of taxonomic markup languages in use to propose a standard for genual use. Such a study would also include looking the conventions already being adopted in Flickr)

To experiment with such tagging, I would copy over some of the images in Doug Kern's collection so that I can experiment with them in my own Flickr space.

Now why should one go through the trouble of formally tagging plant imagery with the genus and species? One major motivation is the prospect of making precise links to sources of detailed information about the plant once one has a precise name. For example, consider one of Doug's images of Spartina foliosa: Spartina foliosa flower on Flickr One can link to the National PLANTS Database by using its advanced query capabilities to determine that the Spartina foliosa has been given the USDA symbol SPFO: Plant Profile for Spartina foliosa (California cordgrass). Moreover, this species has a taxonomic serial number of 41275: ITIS Standard Report Page: Spartina foliosa.

I don't quite understand the importance of the connections I have laid out here. I don't know who uses the symbols or the taxonic serial number. Is the number akin to an ISBN for books (in some really rough way?). At the very least, the Jepson Herberaium has a system that makes use of the ITIS number: UCJEPS: Jepson Interchange: Spartina foliosa Trin. I figure that On-line Resources is a good place to look next to answer more of my questions.

A sidenote: Calflora also provides information about Spartina foliosa: Calflora: Spartina foliosa. Note that Calflora demands registration for most of my readers. Calflora - Obtain An Account: "You must register to use Calflora unless you are under 13, in a K-12 school, or at a public library."