Approaches to Storing and Querying Structural Information in Botanical Specimen Descriptions.

Paterson, Trevor; Kennedy, Jessie

Abstract

We are developing an ontology as a defined terminology for the taxonomic description of botanical specimens. To allow these descriptions to unambiguously refer to a given plant structure, the ontology specifies compositional relationships between anatomical structures, as well as providing textual definitions for structural terms. We are testing a variety of approaches for representing this compositional hierarchy in a relational database, so that descriptions can refer to the compositional context (path) of any structure being described. We compare the relative advantages of storing and querying path information in an XML representation or as a materialized string.

Citation

Paterson, T., & Kennedy, J. (2004). Approaches to Storing and Querying Structural Information in Botanical Specimen Descriptions. In L. M. MacKinnon, A. G. Burger, & P. Trinder (Eds.), Key technologies for data management: Proceedings of the 21st Annual British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD21) (80-91)

• Conference Name: 21st Annual British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD21)
• Start Date: Jul 7, 2004
• End Date: Jul 9, 2004
• Publication Date: 2004-07
• Deposit Date: Oct 27, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 27, 2009
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 80-91
• Book Title: Key technologies for data management: Proceedings of the 21st Annual British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD21)
• ISBN: 1-904410-12-X
• Keywords: Biology; Data analysis; Computing; Ontological methodology; Defined terminology; Taxonomy; Compositional relationships; Anatomical structures; XML; Materialised strings; Evaluation
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/3025