New Tools for Managing Taxon- and Specimen-based Morphological Data

Academy Of Natural Sciences Philadelphia, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

DELTA (Description Language for Taxonomy) is a widely used program written to manage morphological data for taxonomy. Taxonomy is a basic part of biology, involving the classification of the Earth's biota. Cataloging and understanding biodiversity is dependent on good taxonomy. DELTA has grown through the years but has also developed problems reflecting scalability, data format consistency, and a lack of user-friendliness. DELTA will be reworked from scratch, with the best features of the present system plus new features of data management and functionality. Such tools have been identified by the community as necessary for sharing information about taxonomic characters. The software will be distributed through the web. In addition to streamlining the gathering, standardizing and distribution of morphological data on fossil and living taxa, the software will be a teaching tool for systematics.