[Taxacom] Paleo Morphotypes in Museum Collection Catalogs

[Beach, James H.]

Here is a naïve question, but I know Taxacomers will come to the rescue.

We have a member of the Specify Collections Consortium with a paleo collection, the curator of which is cataloging specimens in our Specify collections management system. She would like to capture information on paleo morphotypes (trait and states) for those specimens using controlled vocabularies.


I am familiar with large amount of work that has gone into data models, database design, standards, an software applications with morphological data over the last 30-40 years, including ongoing active research on building ontologies and the vision to compute over them in phylogenetics.



But given all of that work, is there a relatively straightforward way to represent paleo morphotypes as alternatives to taxonomic identifications in collection databases?   Logically, are they in fact, discrete from taxonomic identity?  (The Curator says they are.)



The researcher is currently compiling lists of characters and states in controlled vocabularies from a standard vert paleo reference works. In addition, we appreciate the need to at least normalize the information and, if possible, to use standard data types as a minimal prerequisite for any possible computation on the data in the future.  Currently for cataloging purposes, the curator requires no analytical capabilities but would simply like to publish the data to online repositories as descriptive catalog data.



Many thanks for any thoughts or suggestions on what we should look out for, or research further.



Jim Beach




James H. Beach · Specify Collections Consortium · Biodiversity Institute · Univ. Kansas · 1345 Jayhawk Blvd. · Lawrence, KS 66045, USA · Office: 785-864-4645 · Cell: 785-331-8508