Adding value to biodiversity images through community annotation

Morphbank, an on-line collection of museum-quality biological images, is an NSF funded project designed to facilitate the on-line collaboration of biologists from around the world [3]. Our primary focus is to aid in the collection and management of images that are useful in phylogenetic research. Morphbank users are actively collaborating on the creation of information that represents the associations among images and related biodiversity data objects. This paper describes the Morphbank annotation tool and data models and gives examples of how users create structured information in the system. Schematized annotation provides biologists with a flexible framework to create semantically-rich annotations using their own data models.