A collaborative knowledge base on plants
There are currently many sites offering information on plants, but the information is fragmented. Centralizing all the available information on a single site would provide a global view of a plant. This 2022-2023 project aims at setting up such a collaborative knowledge base on plants. Each plant will be described in terms of morphology, ecology, properties and uses. The description will be presented in the form of a standardized illustrated sheet accessible online, downloadable in pdf format.
The online collaborative database will be set up with the help of computer scientists and pedagogical engineers, to allow the use by contributors (knowledge input) and users (knowledge output). The targeted contributors are the students of the University of Paris-Saclay for educational purposes (in the form of thematic projects aiming at producing a group of files on a targeted theme, environment or taxonomic group for example), and the members of the Tela Botanica network. A validation committee made up of experts in botany and ecology will be formed. The idea is to cover the French metropolitan flora at first and to extend to other flora later.
The beneficiaries will be multiple: researchers (botany, ecology, agroecology), managers (green spaces, protected areas), gardeners, landscapers, farmers, amateur botanists, and students in two ways, as contributors and as users in the framework of educational projects in botany or ecology.
The project involves:
- 2 C-BASC labs and the graduate school Biosphera: Sophie Nadot as the carrier and Xavier Aubriot (ESE, UPSaclay), Adrienne Ressayre (GQE-Le Moulon, INRAE)
- the Agro Institute, Angers campus (Malécot Valéry)
- the Tela Botanica association in Montpellier
This partnership will allow the knowledge base to quickly become a reference at the scale of the C-BASC perimeter and beyond, at the national scale. The project is co-financed by the Université Paris-Saclay (AAP innovation pédagogique).
