TNLS: Taxonomic activity notification service

Work package 2 of the TETTRIs project and the TETTRIs satellite project TNLS focussed on mechanisms to name match a list of scientific names against an aggregator’s taxonomic dataset. Apart from checking the data quality and other properties of the scientific name, users get the possibility to link their name to a name-identifier (ID) the database provides. This would enable a researcher to follow scientific names and get information of taxonomic or nomenclatural changes affecting them. The idea is to enable users to be informed (via push or pull mechanisms) about changes that affect their name. Changes (as described below) would refer to defined “versions” of the dataset, e.g. daily or weekly snapshots. Here, we are looking into some aspects of such a system, classifying potential audiences, exploring possible changes affecting names in a taxonomic dataset, and identifying technologies that may be used to implement such a service. We are focussing on changes in the core taxonomic and nomenclatural data (classification, acceptance, nomenclature) but this could extend to the addition of new occurrence records or specimens.