While in some ways it's wonderful that the Catalogue of Life provides a complete data dump of its contents, this strikes me as a rather old-fashioned way to distribute it. So I began to wonder how this could be done differently, and started to think of CouchDB. In particular, I began to think of being able to upload the data to a service (such as Cloudant) where the data could be stored and replicated at scale. then I began to think about forking the data. The Catalogue of Life has some good things going for it (some 1.25 million species, and around 2 million names), and is widely used as the backbone of sites such as EOL, GBIF, and iNaturalist.org, but parts of it are broken. Literature citations are often incomplete or mangled, and in places it is horribly out of date.
Rather than wait for the Catalogue of Life to fix this, what if we could share the data, annotate it, correct mistakes, and add links? In particular, what if we link the literature to records in the Biodiversity Heritage Library so at we can finally start to connect names to the primary literature (imagine clicking on a name and being able to see the original species description). We could have something akin to github, but instead of downloading and forking code, we download and fork data. CouchDB makes replicating data pretty straightforward.
So, I've started to upload some Catalogue of Life records to a CouchDB instance at Cloudant, and write a simple web site to display these records. For example, you can see the record for at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/col/?id=e9fda47629c1102b9a4a00304854f820:
The e9fda47629c1102b9a4a00304854f820 in this URL is the UUID of the record in CouchDB, which is also the UUID embedded in the (non-functional) CoL LSIDs. This ensures the records have a unique identifier, but also one that is related to the original record. You can search for names, or browse the immediate hierarchy around a name. I hope to add more records over time as I explore this further — at the moment I've added a few lizards, wasps, and conifers while I explore how to convert the CoL records into a sensible JSON object to upload to CouchDB.
The next step is to think about this as a way to distribute data (want a copy of CoL, just point your CouchDB at the Cloudant URL and replicate it), and to think about how to build upon the basic records, editing and improving them, then thinking about how to get that information into a future version of the Catalogue.