On April 27 I had the opportunity to spend a day with Paddy Patterson's group in Woods Hole. He directs the IT operation underlying EOL, but has a background in systematics and an outlook that is broader than just EOL. Paddy generously allowed me to suck up a day of his and his staff's time to get a better sense of where we stand on digital taxonomic issues. What I wanted to find out from was whether the roadmap we were contemplating for the peracarid taxonomy and associated information would fit well into ongoing digital initiatives.

The answer in brief, is “yes”.

Some specifics:

• There isn't any sort of grand unified taxonomic hierarchy in existence on the Web today. We should pick the best digital venue for our findings, based on our own needs. It's up to us to subsequently convince digital taxonomy providers (such as ITIS, Catalog of Life, GenBank, etc.) to adopt our classification once it's online. So the plan of working with marinespecies.org still seems like the best way to go.
• EOL's LifeDesk system is undergoing rapid development, but isn't quite “there” yet. The goal of LifeDesks is to provide a platform for gathering and maintaining the digital taxonomic and species information for a taxon. The system is in its early stages, and so doesn't support everything we'd like (yet). However, with time, LifeDesks may well be a good place to migrate our collected data once our initial project is complete. That would enable sub-taxon editors to have direct control of the online information on their group. We'll revisit this in a few years, while working with LifeDesk programmers in the meantime.
• In a general sense, we're hunting down the right path. As a group, we definitely should be looking for our own digital home for our taxonomy. We definitely should be hanging whatever information we find useful from that taxonomic backbone (though not necessarily on the same website). We definitely should be making our information as accessible as possible using pre-existing web standards.