Dutch Species Catalogue 

The Dutch Species Catalogue is realized through a series of projects by the Dutch national museum of natural history Naturalis, the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality and other partners.

The goal of the Species Catalogue is to make the highly fragmented information on Dutch biodiversity centrally available in a standardized way and to set a standard for nomenclature and presence data of Dutch species.

The Catalogue deals, in other words, with connecting all sorts of resources and with making these resources accessible to end users through the web, in a coherent and integrated way. This concerns a large variation of data, such as:

• taxonomy
• species recognition
• similar species
• relations to other species
• images and sounds
• presence data
• biotopes
• biology
• harmfulness and usefulness
• protection and policy
• migration

This information is managed and made available by various different content providers and is kept on several different systems and locations.

The partners in the Dutch Species Catalogue have used the principles of the RNA architecture already over a period of time to create a findability layer that improves the accessibility of their heterogeneous content.

In recent subprojects of the Species Catalogue, the RNA Toolset is being used as an aid to maintain and extend the findability layer and to create several types of structured and textual content. In addition the Toolset is also being used as an interface between various kinds of complex taxonomic information in the SKOS- and RDF format on one end, and the elaborate tab structure of the Species Catalogue site on the other.

See also www.nederlandsesoorten.nl