TOLKIN, formerly known as the Botany Browser, is an information management and analytical web application actively being developed by the Yale Peabody Museum to provide informatics support for phylodiversity and biodiversity research such as that funded by the NSF Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) and Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (PBI) programs. TOLKIN actively supports the Angiosperm, Gymnosperm and Liverwort AToLs, as well as the Euphorbia PBI. As a web-based application, collaborators in different locations and environments can access shared data on voucher specimens, taxonomy, bibliography, morphology, DNA samples and sequences. Automated out-links are currently available to relevant external data resources such as IPNI, Tropicos, GenBank, ING, TreeBASE, and BioGeomancer. Functionality of these concepts for botanical data was demonstrated by Nico Cellinese (2002) in a prototype tool, FileTaxon, developed with FileMaker Pro.

A developing analytical component of TOLKIN includes workbench functionality for analysis of sequence data by automating the assemblage of Fasta files, alignments, and output of Nexus files, in addition to sequence BLASTing capability. Our current funding supports work to integrate tools for phylogeographical analyses, including estimation of phylogeographic diversity (PD Explorer), and phylogenetic tree navigation.