(
2010-09-20)
Patterson, David J.; Cooper, J.; Kirk, Paul M.; Pyle, R. L.; Remsen, David P.
Those who seek answers to big, broad questions about biology, especially questions
emphasizing the organism (taxonomy, evolution, ecology), will soon benefit from an emerging
names-based infrastructure. It will draw on the almost universal association of organism names
with biological information to index and interconnect information distributed across the Internet.
The result will be a virtual data commons, expanding as further data are shared, allowing biology to
become more of a “big science”. Informatics devices will exploit this ‘big new biology’,
revitalizing comparative biology with a broad perspective to reveal previously inaccessible trends
and discontinuities, so helping us to reveal unfamiliar biological truths. Here, we review the first
components of this freely available, participatory, and semantic Global Names Architecture.
