Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge
Ecoinformatics site parent site of Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics site parent site of SEEK - Home
Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge








 

 

 

Use Case 8
Your trail: UseCase12 | UseCase13 | UseCase14 | UseCase15 | UseCase2 | UseCase3 | UseCase4 | UseCase5 | UseCase6 | UseCase7

Use Case 8: Display Concept Connections Dynamically - Partial or Entire Classifications

Actors

Primary Actor
most likely an individual researcher, ecologist analyzing "legacy data" or (more commonly) taxonomist, or anyone interested in viewing entire sets of classificatory changes through time.

Description

Very similar to the Use Case providing a dynamic perspective on individual concept lineages. The main difference is that now a more comprehensive view is offered (in terms of numbers of taxonomic concepts involved), treating partial or entire classifation systems. Example: the changes from one comprehensive monograph of hickory trees to another, each recognizing 50+ valid species concepts (not just the individual concept lineage of "Carya ovata (Miller) K. Koch sec. Stone, FNA 1997"). A rather impressive example of how this might look like is presented in Graham et. al. 2002 (Taxon 51: 351-358, see especially the screen shots on pp. 354-357, available at http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/publication/op/getpublication/publicationid/278989).

Flow of Events

Pre-conditions

  • The Primary Actor has selected at least two entire sets of taxonomic concepts, pertaining e.g. to independent comprehensive treatments of similar taxa.

Basic Flow

  1. Having specified the relevant and internally coherent sets of taxonomic concepts, the Primary Actor now selects an option "display synonymy and parent/child connections among classifications dynamically".
  2. In the Use Case considered here, the returned listing should only include "expert-made" connections among concepts. If probabilistically calculated concept connections are provided as well, then the matching algorithm would certainly have to take more variables (such as logical incompatibilities of alternative connections among nested classifications) into consideration than required for the "token" one-to-one concept connecting.
  3. A textual and/or visual display is returned to the user, illustrating the changes in the lateral (synonymy) and vertical (parent/child) concept connections from one classification system to another, etc., in the correct temporal sequence.
  4. Depedending on the scope of each connected classification system, the display might be presented in one summary and/or in multiple segments.
  5. Based on the results, the user can now understand and communicate the extent of changes among authoritative treatments of similar taxa.

Examples

See screen shots of the Apiaceae examples in Graham et al. 2002 (see URL above).

Post-conditions

This Use Case will assist "experts" in manually adding connections among concepts stored in the SEEK Taxon database that did not exist before.

Alternative Flows

  • See Use Case on dynamic relations among individual concept lineages.

Further Details

See other Use Cases involving or expanding on queries.

Non-functional Requirements

Digital availability of the relevant information. This is a powerful way to visualize the evolution of classifications.

Issues

See comments on Use Case to display individual concept lineages. This is not a short-term project.

History

26 March 2004
(NMF) Use Case created from previous Word document.


Go to top   Edit this page   More info...   Attach file...
This page last changed on 30-Jun-2004 13:20:28 PDT by LTER.stekell.


This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award 0225676. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

LTER Logo
Long Term Ecological Research Network, UNM National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UCSB Biodiversity Research Center, KU San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD
 
Arizona State University Napier University University of North Carolina University of Vermont
 
UC Davis Genome Center

Copyright 2004 Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics, University of New Mexico, The Regents of the University of California, and University of Kansas