A wais index for USDA list of Plant genus names

[Jim Croft]

USDA list of Flowering Plant Names
----------------------------------

The available files that consitute the electronic data of the USDA list
of flowering plants names publication have been concatenated and now
exist as three files, two large, on the Australian National Botanic
Gardens gopher.  The original files were extracted by FTP from Flora
On-line on the Taxacom server (or was it from the Taxacom gopher
directory? - doesn't matter really - both at huh.harvard.edu) and are
also available on the ANBG gopher.

This gopher can be found at 155.187.10.12 port 70, or selected from the
Harvard University Biodiversity Gopher (huh.harvard.edu port 70) or a
number of biolgical biological gopher sites.  If you are not running a
gopher client, telnet to your favorite public gopher site (such as
info.anu.edu.au and log in as info - the Australian National University
gopher) and find us under other gophers or similar.

The USDA files can be found under ANBG Information Services/ANBG IBIS
Database Gateway/USDA Plant Families and Genus Names, or under /Tools and
Reference Utilities/USDA Plant Families and Genus Names.

The concatenated formatted text file of the list, usda-catalogue.txt, is
now searchable through a wais index.  This file is very large (c. 750 k)
so do not attempt to save/or mail it unless you have a lot of space
and a lot of time.

The wais search can be made on family, genus, author or synonym, with the
common booleans 'and', 'or', 'not', and returns the complete formated
family entries that meet the search criteria.  As such it is somewhat
different to the searches of the Australian Plant Name Index and the
Names in Current Use which return individual taxon entries.  However,
browsing or searching within a family for the desired information is
better than nothing and will have to do until the list is available in a
database to be indexed.

As an interim measure, the two raw data datafiles, genus.dat and
synonyms.dat are are also searchable through a common index, on a record
by record basis.  The returned record is as it is in the data file:
quoted strings, delimited by commas.

I am sure that if you do not like what is there, the good folks in
Beltsville would be happy to hear from you.

jim
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Croft                  [Herbarium CBG]           internet: jrc at anbg.gov.au
Australian National Botanic Gardens                     voice:  +61-6-2509 490
GPO Box 1777, Canberra, ACT 2601, AUSTRALIA               fax:  +61-6-2509 599
____Biodiversity Directorate, Australian National Parks & Wildlife Service____

______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Croft                  [Herbarium CBG]           internet: jrc at anbg.gov.au
Australian National Botanic Gardens                     voice:  +61-6-2509 490
GPO Box 1777, Canberra, ACT 2601, AUSTRALIA               fax:  +61-6-2509 599
____Biodiversity Directorate, Australian National Parks & Wildlife Service____