[Biojava-l] taxa

[Tom Oinn]

Matthew Pocock wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I've checked in a preliminary taxa implementation to:
> 
> org.biojava.bio.taxa
> 
> There is a demo at:
> 
> demos/seq/TestSwissprotOrg.java
> 
> and I've added a seq io object to:
> 
> org.biojava.bio.seq.io.OrganismParser
> 
> There is some work to do - I think Taxa instances should be annotatable,
> and also the stringification API should be split out into a light-weight
> interface.

A potentially interesting aside; a lot of work was (and is being) done
on making our taxonomy more interesting. This has been done primarily by
adding auxiliary data to nodes in the taxonomic tree, such as images,
range maps and sounds where applicable. What would the best way be to
link these kinds of data to your taxonomy objects? 

btw - for an example go to www.ebi.ac.uk/newt and search for 'felis
silvestris' (press the button with a * on it), this shows the kind of
data that we collect for each node. I suggest that to be truly useful to
us it would have to be possible to encapsulate those data... I'm happy
to help write code to do so too.

Tom