EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

Descriptive data are one of the most important categories of information produced by taxonomists when describing new species or performing taxonomic revisions. This is why the EDIT Common Data Model (CDM) is designed to include and store descriptive data. SDD is the current TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) standard for descriptive data. Most of the existing software managing descriptive data (e.g. Lucid, Xper², DiversityDescription) already support it, allowing their users to import or export descriptive datasets. An SDD-CDM import/export module is urgently needed as there is, for now, no dedicated editor of structured descriptive data in EDIT. Therefore, editing the data in existing tools and importing them into the CDM is the only way to handling descriptive data in the EDIT Platform. Moreover, the SDD export from CDM is a way of getting back descriptive data in the above-mentioned software tools and then benefit from their specificity for running some analysis on descriptive data (interactive identification, comparison of taxa, etc.).