The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) is a five-year, EU-funded Network of Excellence, the purpose of which is to encourage better integration of effort in taxonomy across Europe. It has long been felt that support for taxonomy will be much improved if taxonomists can unify their effort and ‘work as one’. That is a demanding aim, but we can at least try to move towards it.
EDIT is led by the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, and is formed of a consortium of many European institutions. The project is divided into a number of ‘Workpackages’, one of which (WP6) is dedicated to ‘Unifying revisionary taxonomy’. The Diptera have been selected as demonstrator taxa for this Workpackage. The project provides an ideal opportunity to consider working together more effectively. We should like to build on the goodwill that exists between entomologists (professional and amateur) in the hope of furthering the aims of EDIT, of taxonomy, and, particularly, of dipterology.
www.edit-insects.info is aimed to be a communication tool so that you can participate and ‘have a say’ in the development of the structures needed to build revisionary taxonomy on the web. The website will display documents and texts relevant to the insect exemplar group. Registered users can add comments and contributors can add pages and upload files. Comments will be taken into account and if appropriate incorporated into the documents.
Currently we are testing the Diptera portal as well as the Scratchpads, both of which deliver nomenclatural and taxonomic data as well as images. The portals have been developed by our IT partners (WP5), the Scratchpads by WP6.
- Add new comment
- 1126 reads
