This document describes in some detail the eFlora web application,
a powerful tool for the identification of plant species. It incorporates the corpus
of Flora Iberica, a scientific description of the vascular plants living in the
Iberian Peninsula, which is treated as unstructured information and therefore
indexed by a full text search engine tool, in our case Lucene. eFlora also
includes dichotomous keys, which are displayed using Hyperbolic Geometry.
By making intelligent use of the keys, we have created two original and useful
features, the comparison of arbitrarily chosen species, which is resolved by
a dynamic generation of subkeys applied to these selected species, and
the presentation of dichotomous keys in the form of a Virtual Assistant, or
conversational robot, using our solution DialGraph, which allows to nonacademic
users an approach in Natural Language, such as chat, or voice
recognition, Text to Speech Synthesis (TTS) or even Automatic Translation
when dealing with a multilanguage context. Concerning the configuration of
the Virtual Assistant, we provide a very intuitive BPM-like graphical design.
This approach to dichotomous keys helps teaching biodiversity science,
enhances the awareness of its importance, and makes citizens emotionally
closer to science.
