Techniques for effective integration, maintenance and evolution of species databases

The LITCHI project is concerned with the integration and maintenance of databases of biological knowledge organized by species. We use constraints pertaining to good taxonomic practice in order to identify taxonomic conflicts in individual species databases and in databases formed by merging species databases from distinct sources. The LITCHI system can be used to resolve such conflicts incrementally. As the project has progressed, we have identified a number of distinctive features of the problem domain, and needs of the intended users, which have had a significant impact on the techniques and modes of operation that we found to be appropriate, especially in contrast with applications that handle rapidly-accumulating `raw' data. It is upon these aspects of LITCHI that we concentrate in the present paper, viewing LITCHI as an example of the more general problem of merging scientific data sets in which conflicts between the terminology used can occur.