EFFECTIVELY SEARCHING SPECIMEN AND OBSERVATION DATA WITH TOQE, THE THESAURUS OPTIMIZED QUERY EXPANDER

Authors

  • Anton Güntsch Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
  • Niels Hoffmann Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
  • Patricia Kelbert Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
  • Walter G. Berendsohn Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v6i1.1631

Keywords:

Specimen portal, query expansion, thesaurus, XML, concept, BioCASE, SYNTHESYS, GBIF, EDIT, taxonomy

Abstract

Today’s specimen and observation data portals lack a flexible mechanism, able to link up thesaurus-enabled data sources such as taxonomic checklist databases and expand user queries to related terms, significantly enhancing result sets. The TOQE system (Thesaurus Optimized Query Expander) is a REST-like XML web-service implemented in Python and designed for this purpose. Acting as an interface between portals and thesauri, TOQE allows the implementation of specialized portal systems with a set of thesauri supporting its specific focus. It is both easy to use for portal programmers and easy to configure for thesaurus database holders who want to expose their system as a service for query expansions. Currently, TOQE is used in four specimen and observation data portals. The documentation is available from http://search.biocase.org/toqe/.

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Author Biographies

  • Anton Güntsch, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
    head, section of biodiversity informatics
  • Niels Hoffmann, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
    developer, biodiversity informatics section
  • Patricia Kelbert, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
    developer, biodiversity informatics section
  • Walter G. Berendsohn, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
    head, dept. of biodiversity informatics and laboratories

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Published

2009-09-05

Issue

Vol. 6 (2009)

Section

Articles (peer-reviewed)

License

Copyright (c) 2009 Anton Güntsch, Niels Hoffmann, Patricia Kelbert, Walter G. Berendsohn

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. All articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

How to Cite

Güntsch, Anton, Niels Hoffmann, Patricia Kelbert, and Walter G. Berendsohn. 2009. “EFFECTIVELY SEARCHING SPECIMEN AND OBSERVATION DATA WITH TOQE, THE THESAURUS OPTIMIZED QUERY EXPANDER”. Biodiversity Informatics 6 (1): 53-58. https://doi.org/10.17161/bi.v6i1.1631.