Botany relies heavily on specimen cataloguing. Since Carl Linnaeus established Linnaean taxonomy, the model has been used as the primary method of classification for living organisms. It is a highly structured and universally recognisable classification. This taxonomic classification is the common ground on which botanical databases are currently built. Records are organised and queried using this structure.
The current trend is for botanical information systems to move towards a different kind of information: georeferenced information. There are increasing efforts to retrieve spatial information from current botanical records, gathered from historic collection catalogues. With the growing interest in spatial information, there is also the need for spatial querying. Using current solutions, users are limited to searching for specimens in specific countries or using free text search on specific locality fields. All these solutions are text-based querying approaches. We propose an alternative: using a kind of database specifically designed for querying spatial data, allowing for more efficiency and flexibility than textbased queries.
We aim at providing a storage and querying service for applications that need it, in exchange for the collection of specimen data. This is done in such a way that users -botanical databases, applications, or botanical parks- can send specimen information easily. Applications can also query the central system in a flexible, yet powerful and technology-independent way. They do not need to know about the implementation details of the underlying geospatial database nor make serious changes to their current systems. Also, information exchange is of the utmost importance and the system must be able to interpret and provide information in standard formats.
By providing these geobotanical services, the proposed repository can become a hub for botanical information exchange, linking several databases. At the same time, it can support various applications, providing clues about species propagation and growth patterns. This is particularly interesting for users who want to combine this data with other types of geospatial information.
To demonstrate the usefulness of this repository in a real scenario, a prototype client for a botanical park was developed. FEUP Park, as it was named, supports specimen insertion along with other the common operations of a botanical park, using the repository's geospatial querying capabilities.