Encyclopedia of Life Blog

We released version 2.15 of our code to all 115+ LifeDesks sites today. This was a particularly important release because we rewrote a lot of code, dug deep into solving some performance issues, and reconstructed the databases for all LifeDesks to accommodate these changes. The aim of this release was to have a better storage and presentation mechanism for applying tags with specific biological meaning to names. We used this mechanism for ranks, common name language codes, and taxonomic relationships (e.g. the term “synonym”) between names because it allows users to add/remove terms. We thought this was pretty cool, so we opened the gates to allow LifeDesk owners to create their own biological flag ontology and populate it with terms. For example, you may create an ontology called “Biogeographic Region” and populate it with terms “Nearctic”, “Palearctic”, “Holarctic” and the like. Similarly, you could make a flag type called “Habitat” and populate it with terms “Marine”, “Terrestrial” or “Freshwater”.

The classification editor is currently the place where these flags get applied to names, but we’re thinking of other ways to make this much easier and faster. A spreadsheet editor would certainly help in this situation.

We concentrated most on the storage mechanism for these biological flags, but made a first pass at presenting these on taxon pages, which are visible in a special panel called “Biological Flags” on the right side of the page. Eventually, we’ll think of ways to make these

flags clickable and ultimately, ways to share these flags to EOL. We’re also thinking about mechanisms for flags to be shared across LifeDesks so we have our eye on GBIF Vocabularies.