A Taxonomic Search Engine: federating taxonomic databases using web services.
BACKGROUND
The taxonomic name of an organism is a key link between different databases that store information on that organism. However, in the absence of a single, comprehensive database of organism names, individual databases lack an easy means of checking the correctness of a name. Furthermore, the same organism may have more than one name, and the same name may apply to more than one organism.


RESULTS
The Taxonomic Search Engine (TSE) is a web application written in PHP that queries multiple taxonomic databases (ITIS, Index Fungorum, IPNI, NCBI, and uBIO) and summarises the results in a consistent format. It supports "drill-down" queries to retrieve a specific record. The TSE can optionally suggest alternative spellings the user can try. It also acts as a Life Science Identifier (LSID) authority for the source taxonomic databases, providing globally unique identifiers (and associated metadata) for each name.


CONCLUSIONS
The Taxonomic Search Engine is available at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ and provides a simple demonstration of the potential of the federated approach to providing access to taxonomic names.
Page
Roderic D M
RD
Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences, Graham Kerr Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk
D002965:Classification; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D003628:Database Management Systems; D019992:Databases as Topic; D016208:Databases, Factual; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D030562:Databases, Protein; D033181:Information Dissemination; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D007256:Information Systems; D020407:Internet; D008490:Medical Informatics; D009316:National Institutes of Health (U.S.); D009317:National Library of Medicine (U.S.); D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein; D012984:Software; D012985:Software Design; D018511:Systems Integration; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D014481:United States; D014584:User-Computer Interface