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Aphia
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Availability: Creative Commons License This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Description
The Aphia platform is an infrastructure designed to capture taxonomic and related data and information, and includes an online editing environment. Aphia is the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species and its more than 80 related global, regional and thematic species databases. It also allows the storage of non-marine data. more

The online editing platform allows easy access to experts so they can update the content of the database in a timely fashion. The content of Aphia can be consulted online, either by individual users or via machine-to-machine interactions. Aphia uses unique and stable identifiers for each available name in the database through the use of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs). The system not only allows the storage of accepted and unaccepted names, but it also documents the relationships between names. This makes it a very powerful tool for taxonomic quality control, and also allows the linking of different pieces of information through scientific names, both within the Aphia platform and in relation to externally hosted databases. Through these LSIDs, Aphia has become an important player in the field of (marine) biodiversity informatics, allowing interactions between its own taxonomic data and e.g., biogeographic databases. Some applications in the field of biodiversity informatics encompass the coupling of species traits and taxonomy, as well as the creation of diverse, expert validated data products that can be used by policy makers, for example. Aphia also supplies (part of) its content to other data integrators and the infrastructure can be used to host orphan databases in danger of being lost.

Scope
Themes:
Biology, Biology > Ecology - biodiversity
Keywords:
Marine/Coastal, Fresh water, Brackish water, Terrestrial, World, Animalia, Bacteria, Chromista, Fungi, Plantae, Protozoa, Viruses

Geographical coverage

Temporal coverage
From 1758 on [In Progress]

Taxonomic coverage
Animalia [WoRMS]
Bacteria [WoRMS]
Chromista [WoRMS]
Fungi [WoRMS]
Plantae [WoRMS]
Protozoa [WoRMS]
Viruses [WoRMS]

Contributors
Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ), moredata creatordata managerdatabase developer

Related datasets
Child dataset:
WoRMS: World Register of Marine Species, more

Publication
Describing this dataset
Vandepitte, L. et al. (2015). How Aphia - the platform behind several online and taxonomically oriented databases - can serve both the taxonomic community and the field of biodiversity informatics. J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 3(4): 1448-1473. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jmse3041448, more

Dataset status: In Progress
Data type: Data
Data origin: Data collection
Metadatarecord created: 2016-07-06
Information last updated: 2017-02-16
All data in the Integrated Marine Information System (IMIS) is subject to the VLIZ privacy policy