Edinburgh Napier University

  All aspects of organismal biology rely on the accurate identification
of specimens described and observed. This is particularly important for
ecological surveys of biodiversity, where organisms must be identified and
labelled, both for the purposes of the original research, but also to allow
reinterpretation or reuse of collected data by subsequent research projects. Yet
it is now clear that biological names in isolation are unsuitable as unique
identifiers for organisms. Much modern research in ecology is based on the
integration (and re-use) of multiple datasets which are inherently complex,
reflecting any of the many spatial and temporal environmental factors and
organismal interactions that contribute to a given ecosystem. We describe
visualization tools that aid in the process of building concept relations between
related classifications and then in understanding the effects of using these
relations to match across sets of classifications.