The World Spider Catalog (WSC) is an online searchable database concerned with

spider Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species ...

taxonomy. It aims to list all accepted families, genera and species, as well as provide access to the related taxonomic literature. The WSC began as a series of individual web pages in 2000, created by

Norman I. Platnick Norman Ira Platnick (December 30, 1951 – April 8, 2020) was an American biological systematist and arachnologist. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Peter J. Solomon Family Curator ...

of the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 int ...

. After Platnick's retirement in 2014, the

Natural History Museum of Bern The Natural History Museum of Bern (german: Naturhistorisches Museum Bern) is a museum in Bern, Switzerland. In its teaching and research it cooperates closely with the University of Bern.relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relati ...

. , 50,151 accepted species were listed. The order Araneae (spiders) has the seventh-most species of all orders. The existence of the World Spider Catalog makes spiders the largest taxon with an online listing that is updated regularly. It has been described as an "exhaustive resource" that has "promoted rigorous scholarship and amplified productivity" in the taxonomy of spiders.

References

External links

{{Wikidata property, P3288
Archive of previous versions
Databases in Switzerland Online taxonomy databases Spiders Arachnology