The Morphster Project

Overview

Morphster is a knowledge acquisition tool for morphology-based studies in systematic biology. It has a service-oriented architecture that enables collaborative studies, and supports interaction with external web services provided by authoritative sources such as uBio naming service and data sources such as Morphbank image repository.

Currently, Morphster supports single-taxon and multi-taxa studies based on morphology:

• Single-taxon studies: retrieving taxon naming information and metadata from uBio, support for OBO and OWL ontologies, image annotation using ontologies, and an image driven workflow to create a Nomina anatomica ontology.
• Multi-taxa studies: creating characters and character states using ontologies, image annotation based on characters and character states, character state data matrix for multiple taxa.

Ontologies developed using Morphster can be directly published online using our Ontobrowser web application.

People

Students:

• Syed Hamid Tirmizi
• Juan Sequeda
• Ferner Cilloniz
• Aaron Strahan
• Kerin Claeson

Former Students:

• Sapna Bafna
• Rui Mao