Introduction - Other taxonomic initiatives

uBio seeks to unify the products of its research with other initiatives to create a common biological informatics infrastructure

There are numerous taxonomic names initiatives large and small addressing various aspects of the names problem within many user communities. Our focus on the needs of libraries who may be uncovering long unused and invalid historical names requires a different cataloging paradigm to effectively manage these publications. uBio is focused on providing a functional solution for this community and steering the results for an eventual union with a single taxonomic names infrastructure.

Efforts include:

• June 2005 - uBio and GBIF signed an MoC
• Jan. 2004 - uBio and GBIF have agreed to define a collaborative nomenclature architecture and will be developing a Memorandum of Cooperation.
• A member of the uBio development team (David Remsen) has been named to the GBIF Electronic Catalog of Names Science subcommittee
• Participation in a global checklist workshop sponsored by the Integrated Taxonomic Information System ITIS focusing on developing a distributed taxonomic workgroup environment
• Membership in the Taxonomic Databases WorkGroup (TDWG) to ensure our efforts complement other efforts and utilize established standards.
• Cooperative agreements with Species 2000 that include the use of the Species 2000 Catalog of Life within the uBioRSS application.