Introduction to development of electronic descriptors of medicinal plants to promote information exchange and sustainable uses of plant genetic resources
2006
Quek, Paul | Cho, Gyu-Taek | Lee, Sok-Young | Batugal, Pons | V. Ramanatha Rao | Park, Yong-Jin
It is important to have an agreement on the traits or descriptors to be used when characterization and evaluating plant genetic resources. The International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) has been working on the development of descriptors for about two decades. The web-based plant descriptors could be used for promoting information exchange and sustainable use of plant genetic resources and systematic characterization and evaluation. The rapid developments in information communication technologies (lCT) have prompted the move towards making the descriptors development process, a time consuming process and involving many experts, into a collaborative online platform and vastly faster than the conventional descriptor development. For example,about 100 crop descriptors have been published by IPGRI and its partners in 20 years. Now, in collaboration with 12 Asian countries, IPORI is developing e-descriptors for medicinal plants. This allows for more descriptor lists to be developed concurrently using an application processing descriptors as XML documents using the Multicentric Platform (http://www.multicentric. com/). In the process of moving from published descriptors to the e-descriptors (which can be published later if necessary), due attention should be paid to issues such as harmonization of descriptor states that have evolved over the last 20 years. In the case of medicinal plants, the challenge goes beyond plants, into the medicines and drugs domain for describing disease, pharmacopoeia and effective chemical constituents and secondary metabolites. e-Descriptor approaches the issues as a documentation tool for domains beyond plants as an option that can be considered for information management.
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