About

Taxonomic databases have been developed to address curatorial management processes, taxonomic and applied biology needs and, more recently, the growing demand for global biodiversity information systems acessible over the World Wide Web.

A basic step towards developing a taxonomic database system is to build a data model to describe the entities involved and relationships among them. This has lead to the development of several models for the design of taxonomic databases (eg., White & Allkin, 1982, 1988; Berendsohn, 1997; Berendsohn et al., 1999). These models are, however, invariably of such complexity as to make them rather difficult to implement and manage (Morris, 2005). The ACACIA design is an attempt to overcome this difficulty, offering a simple but flexible and extensible data model that can be used as a framework for taxonomic information systems. A similar approach for designing comparative genomics databases has been presented by Digiampietri et al. (2003). ACACIA intends to be a practical implementation of the ideal of a "universal biological database structure" (White & Allkin, 1993).

ACACIA is a set of 14 entities or tables based on the relational database approach (Codd, 1970), designed to convey all basic classes of information required for taxonomic databases and facilitate the recording of taxonomic data from literature and other sources (biological collections, field surveys, and other databases). It is not itself a taxonomic database management system, but a generic schema that can be used in building taxon-oriented databases, using any desired combination of computer platform, operating system, database engine, and application programming language. Once implemented, the ACACIA schema can be used to create a wide variety of taxonomic databases of diverse content including monographic databases, species inventories, annotated checklists or identification keys (especially when used in combination with the DELTA system).

The ACACIA design is largely based on and fully compatible with the International Legume Database and Information Service (ILDIS) Type One Data Fields, as well as with the Species 2000 Project Standard Dataset (which is itself loosely derived from the ILDIS standard).