Quality Control/Quality Assurance within the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)

Abstract

The Integrated Taxonomic Information System*1 (ITIS) and Species 2000*2 have worked together for two decades after signing an agreement to form the Catalogue of Life*3 (COL), striving to provide current and complete Global Species Databases (GSDs) from various sources. ITIS has provided many such GSDs to the COL. In this presentation, we will demonstrate in detail the nine aspects of ITIS’ approach to quality assurance/quality control: People, Process, Rules, Standards, Automation, Control, Assurance, Publication, and Feedback. All of these aspects are important and deserve consideration in the creation/maintenance of ITIS’ high quality GSDs. ITIS has also developed a new web-based ‘Taxonomic Workbench’ (TWB) that allows new levels of cooperative effort beyond what ITIS has been able to attain with a desktop version of the software, which has been used for twenty-five years. Some key aspects of these tools and what they will allow are discussed in the last half of the presentation.