Is there a standard data format for taxonomies/classification systems. Should include a specification of text encoding (like LDIF but for taxonomies). If there is I would guess there will be open source implementations (and if not won’t be that hard to write one’s own).
Requirements:
-
Type of taxonmy:
- Enumerations (flat)
- Tree (single parent)
- Lattice (multiple parent)
- Identifiers. Support for at least 10 million possible elements in taxonomy. Optional: Identifiers should be portable across systems (i.e. you can plug different taxonomies together without recoding identifiers). This means probably want a GUID based id system). Required: basic int32 or int64 based identifiers.
Found So Far
- DELTA http://biodiversity.uno.edu/delta/. Seem to be primarily for standard tree taxonomies for animals and plants.
Written Myself
Two taxonomy systems with gui editors and serialization to xml. One in C# and the other in java. Major issue is non-stdness.
Wild Ideas
- Drupal has a pretty nice web-based gui for creating (and using) taxonomies. Could use that as a front end and then serialize to std text format from the drupal backend db
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