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Geological Society, London, Special Publications; 1995; v. 97; p. 55-64;
DOI: 10.1144/GSL.SP.1995.097.01.07
© 1995 Geological Society of London

Database design

Towards the creation of an international database of palaeontology

M. Lhotak & M. C. Boulter

Palaeobiology Research Unit, University of East London, Romford Road, London E15 4LZ, UK

The Plant Fossil Record (PFR) database is being built to include biological, geological, geographical and bibliographic information of all authoritative plant fossil citations throughout the world. The interactions between these have created standardized records from different sources and programs have been written to add and reorganize data. Techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR), e-mail and diversity interfaces are used. Interdisciplinary and cultural aspects of this ambitious project are being considered. The work is to help as many different specialists as possible to use palaeontological data and to relate these data to evolutionary and biostratigraphic problems as well as to climatic aspects of global change. The structure of the database comprises some original features. It is a temporal facility: each edit or addition is timed and dated so that its state at any particular time can be recalled. Geological time and the associated global palaeogeography are also built into the database giving a time dimension to record likely evolutionary trends.