PNSS: An online plant name service system.

Abstract

Biodiversity plays a vital role in human survival and development. Consequently, the protection of biodiversity has become a global concern. Biological names serve as biological identifiers and the use of correct biological names helps promote biodiversity conservation research. At present, there are numerous taxonomic databases and software tools available worldwide for processing plant names. However, these resources are scattered across various database websites or personal computers. Users must invest a significant amount of time collecting these resources and expend substantial effort to learn, use and maintain them, consequently leading to high user learning and usage costs. Here, we propose a solution to address the above problem. We collected mainstream and freely available taxonomic datasets from around the world, integrated them into an extensive taxonomic dataset and subsequently mapped the data in this summary database to Solr search engine. Then, based on these taxonomic datasets, we designed database, algorithms and system, developed the system and finally established an online plant name service system (PNSS). The PNSS not only integrates the mainstream taxonomic datasets, but also offers free plant name retrieval, matching, search, parsing and application programming interface (API) services to help biologists conduct more effective research on biodiversity conservation.