European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT)

EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy) brings together 27 institutions from Europe, Russia and the USA in a Network of Excellence funded by the European Union

EDIT (’EDIT: Toward the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy’) is an EU-funded Network of Excellence (NoE) project designed to promote integration of research activity and capacity building between European taxonomic institutes and to provide effective taxonomic support for conservation. It is coordinated by the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and involves eight workpackages with 27 participating institutions in Europe, Russia and the USA.

The Kew contribution  focuses primarily on the closely linked Workpackage 5 (‘Internet Platform for Cybertaxonomy’) and Workpackage 6 (‘Unifying Revisionary Taxonomy’) involving close collaboration between Kew, The Natural History Museum, London and the Berlin Botanical Garden

Workpackage 6 focusses on the transfer of  revisionary taxonomy to the web environment. This is being accomplished using a small number of selected demonstrator taxa (PALMWEB is being built at Kew) which are highly integrated with  the Work Package 5 CDM data model, and a much larger number of websites called Scratchpads (http://scratchpads.eu/) built on DRUPAL open source software, which are pioneering a large scale migration of activity by taxonomic communities to the internet environment, potentially linking them to the global Encyclopedia of Life project.

RBG Kew is coordinating the provision of revisionary data for selected plant families, with the focus initially on palms.  The CATE Araceae web revision is also integrated with EDIT’s data model.

Workpackage 5 provides the web platform and associated software tools (http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/platform/) to facilitate integration and dissemination of taxonomic data through the internet. The model taxa are used as demonstrators; WP 5 alsp investigates the potential for integration between the software development capacities of European taxonomic institutes.

Kew is also active in other work packages:  Board of Directorsand developing long-term strategy (WP1), integration of publications media (WP1), evaluating user needs for taxonomic data (WP1, WP4), integration of collections, bioinformatics and  DNA barcoding (WP3), public awareness and public relations, training and capacity building  (WP8), Gender Action Plan.

By the end of the five-year period it is expected that unified revisions will have been undertaken for subsets of the demonstrator taxa and that the work of constructing the expert taxonomic networks will show the means by which integrated effort of taxonomists can be achieved. A further aim is to encourage, by example and encouragement, the construction of further expert taxonomic networks.

EDIT started work officially on 1 March 2006 with 11.9 million euros of funding committed by the EU.  It will run over five years until February 2011. The general EDIT website is at www.e-taxonomy.eu.