What is SynoSpecies?

The Plazi association provides a digital repository with taxonomic treatments. A taxonomic treatment is a section in an article published in a journal that defines a new taxon (i.e. a name for new species) or a change to a taxon (e.g. when two species have been found to be identical). Plazi uses various technologies to extract the information (aka the semantic content) to these treatments and makes them publicly accessible in various formats, including the Linked Data format RDF. The RDF description describes a small knowledge graph that describes the relations between the publications, authors, and species names pertinent to the treatment. In the Plazi TreatmentBank all these treatments are separated entities, so there are hundreds of thousand little knowledge graphs of liberated data.

SynoSpecies unites the RDF data of all treatments in a single AllegroGraph RDF repository. The different graphs can be accessed as a single large graph and queried via the W3C standard query language SPARQL.