Acknowledgments
The original
taxonomic backbone of the Nearctic Spider Database is Norman I. Platnick's World Spider Catalog,
version 5.1 via Robert Raven, University of Queensland. This taxonomic
treatise of the World's spiders has its origins in the early- to
mid-1900's and is an invaluable resource for all araneologists. The
Nearctic Spider Database now reflects the material depicted in the present World
Spider Catalog with a few exceptions.
Joining specimen data to taxonomic data is not without its share of
challenges. Less than 1% of the recognized taxonomic names had to
be set aside because their inclusion would have resulted in erroneous
species listed when joined to specimen tables containing these synonyms.
This is a relatively small number of records and it is doubtful if many
specimens will be dynamically excluded from compiled species lists or
collection locality maps because of this explicit omission. You may view the excluded names.
When future versions of the World Spider Catalog are released,
there will be a slight delay while the Nearctic Spider Database tables
are adjusted to mirror changes in spider nomenclature. However, this
brief delay will not affect submitted records. All specimen data remain
static and untouched. Manual adjustments
to nomenclature in peripheral taxonomic tables is a relatively rapid,
though manual, administrator-run process. Separating taxonomic tables from specimen
tables enables the real-time compilation and display of species lists
and collection locality maps. To date, the following
items from the World Spider Catalog are integrated in the Nearctic
Spider Database:
| Item | Count |
| Species: | 4,490 |
| Recognized Names: | 39,318 |
| References: | 4,516 |
Spider Common Names
The American Arachnological Society's Committee on Common Names of Arachnids kindly provided a list of official spider common names.
Database and Contributor Template Development
Felix A. H. Sperling (University of Alberta, UASM Curator) provided constructive suggestions for the choice of fields. Don Buckle (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) and Joey Slowik (Denver Museum of Nature and Science) were early testers of a compiled Microsoft Access template (replaced by an online, AJAX application) and provided valuable ideas for its development. Derek Munro (former Biological Informatics Specialist, Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility) provided support for configuring and implementing the Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR) provider application.
Applications Development
Matt Brown was instrumental in assisting with and designing most of the features in the AJAX-based data management application the skeleton of which is based on Rico LiveGrid. Steve White at Online Archaeology was a great help with the co-development of the Google Maps selector box. Rod Page maintains bioGUID, whose reference parsing services make the Taxonomic and Natural History References useful. Rod also developed code for the "Browse Tree" function on every species page.