Plinian Core (PliC,
https://github.com/PlinianCore/Documentation/wiki/About) was conceived as a standard for publishing and sharing information about all kinds of properties and traits related to taxa (of any rank), including descriptions, nomenclature, conservation status, management, natural history, etc. The development of the web editor Mamut allows users of the Biodiversity Catalogue of Colombia (
http://catalogo.biodiversidad.co) to incorporate bio-ecological information about taxa, following the attributes and definitions set out in the PliC. The creation of this tool involved a close collaboration between the Information Technology and the Content Management teams of the Biodiversity Information System of Colombia (SiB Colombia), which allowed the integration of both the application profile and the online interface so that users can access it to create or edit content about a particular taxon.
This editor is composed of two main parts. The frontend, called Mamut (
https://github.com/SIB-Colombia/mamut), was developed using the Angular framework (
https://angularjs.org), and provides a series of organized sections according to the different elements of the Plinian Core. Any information sent to Mamut is conveyed to the second component, the backend a.k.a Chigui (
https://github.com/SIB-Colombia/chigui), developed in NodeJS.
Based on the Plinian Core schema and terms (
https://github.com/PlinianCore/Documentation/wiki#--list-of-terms) defined at the 2015 PliC Interest Group meeting in Mexico, the SiB Colombia standard profile consist now of 165 attributes selected from the original and grouped almost on the same sections proposed then, and are now available to document on Mamut. Today, the editor contains some modifications that simplify and adapt the standard to the mainly Colombian researchers' needs. Mamut represents an ongoing open access tool that other countries or initiatives can use for inspiration or to repurpose when developing their own species catalog editor.
