From catalogs to phenotypes: The evolution and current status of TaxonWorks with emphasis on its utility for entomologists

Taxonomists are the quintessential data integrators, their treatments producing data the lands throughout the biodiversity knowledge graph. To facilitate the population of a biodiversity knowledge graph with the complete output of a new taxonomic treatment a digital workbench or toolset that spans the potential semantics is required. Building such a workbench is a daunting task, and a tiny minority uses those approaches that currently exist. Furthermore, the key data provided by taxonomists, anatomical descriptions, are poorly integrated into these workbenches, and therefor the knowledge graph. Methods: To engage taxonomists and encourage them to ultimately enrich the biodiversity knowledge graph we posit that we require better software, specifically better user interfaces. To explore and prototype new interfaces we use a Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) approach. Our goal is to develop software interfaces that allow taxonomists to do their work while simultaneously improving the semantics of their data at multiple levels via concurrent development of anatomy ontologies and cross-references to controlled vocabularies or data standards. Results/Conclusion: Interfaces are both proposed, and currently being implemented in TaxonWorks, an open-source web-application available at http://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup/taxonworks. The benefits of anatomy ontologies to greatly increase the number of nodes and edges in the biodiversity knowledge graph are explored. Limitations and major bottlenecks of both a technical nature, and particular to entomologists, are overviewed.