Also, check out this site http://www.discoverlife.org/
My spouse is a taxonomic botanist and has worked on some of these types of problems. The real question is, how much detail do you want to cover in the key? Do you want to stick strictly to data that can be gathered without doing DNA analysis, or include DNA workups? What about territory/range data for species? Images of typical and atypical specimens?
I know that 5 or 6 years ago, when we jointly looked at some ideas, a fairly detailed physical key for several species, along with images and the java engine would fit in reasonable mid-range Palm PDA...
By the by, there is on-going work on defining the XML language used to describe such keys, completely.
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Also, check out this site http://www.discoverlife.org/
My spouse is a taxonomic botanist and has worked on some of these types of problems. The real question is, how much detail do you want to cover in the key? Do you want to stick strictly to data that can be gathered without doing DNA analysis, or include DNA workups? What about territory/range data for species? Images of typical and atypical specimens?
I know that 5 or 6 years ago, when we jointly looked at some ideas, a fairly detailed physical key for several species, along with images and the java engine would fit in reasonable mid-range Palm PDA...
By the by, there is on-going work on defining the XML language used to describe such keys, completely.