Encourage the use of AphiaID whenever possible

[mzur]

We should encourage users more to link their labels with a WoRMS AphiaID. Ideas:

• Suggest WoRMS labels while users type in their custom label name. They should be able to use their own label name or take the name provided by WoRMS. If a WoRMS label is selected, the AphiaID will be associated with the new custom label.

• Incorporate the WoRMS "taxon match tool". This could be used to map existing labels or whole label trees to WoRMS labels/AphiaIDs after they have been created.

• Add a button "view in WoRMS" (maybe later SMarTaR-ID?) to each label that has an AphiaID. The button opens the respective page in WoRMS or SMarTaR-ID.

[tschoeni]

In case this is not possible / not wanted - but also generally - how about making BIIGLE label ids more consistent / back-traceable?

Much like WoRMS uses LSID identifiers such as "urn:lsid:marinespecies.org:taxname:123084" would it be possible for BIIGLE to use similar identifiers in export (e.g. reports) such as: "urn:lsid:biigle.de:labelid:56789"?

Using this LSID scheme would of course require that a public BIIGLE endpoint exists for those ids where humans and machines can lookup information what that label refers to (so it would only be possible for public label trees?!). Of course this also links to the "label tress as label catalogues" feature of BIIGLE.

[mzur]

That's an interesting idea we should talk about sometime. At the moment, I find it hard to distinguish between a potential "BIIGLE label archive" and WoRMS, except that the BIIGLE thing would not be reviewed by taxonomists. But I'm not familiar enough with the field to know what the demands of taxonomists are here and what tools we could offer to help them (beside the ideas mentioned above). I definitely agree that we could start to focus more on the "precious time of the few taxonomists" in contrast to the "precious time of the few annotators".

[merlinbest5]

Taxonomy person here :) I spend a lot of time bridging the gap between image-based identifications and those traditional taxonomists make in the lab. A big problem with us using WoRMS is that many many annotations will be a morphotype, not a traditional species name, as you often need the actual organism in your hand/microscope to assign a species name. Right now we have our own custom morphotype codes/OTU's for this, but we're looking to switch to https://smartar-id.app/ (specifically built for identifications from imagery). Something like their SMID code is hopefully the direction things are going, it does link to a higher-level AphiaID as well.