PhD

I am currently going through the painful process of writing up my PhD. I haven't decided on a title yet. The official title is "Tooling up for the Tree of Life", I have also been flaunting a very vague title "Phyloinformatics". Essentially, I built a data warehouse of taxonomic names for the purposes of of building a taxonomic backbone into TreeBASE. The warehouse contains names from multiple data sources so that there is broad coverage. The database, differs from most other taxonomic name servers in that the database also stores the individual classifications from each of the datasources, which can be used to perform hierarchical queries. The purpose of this database is to enable a kind of query expansion on taxon names. The best example is when someone submits a search using a vernacular name like birds, this name should translate (expand) to the latin name (Aves) and hierarchically to include all children of the term.