The Systematics community works to increase our understanding of biological diversity through identifying and classifying organisms and using phylogenies to understand the relationships between those organisms. It has made great progress in the building of phylogenies and in the development of algorithms. However, it has insufficient provision for the preservation of research outcomes and making those widely accessible and queriable, and this is where database technologies can help. This thesis makes a contribution in the area of database usability, by addressing the query needs present in the community, as supported by the analysis of query logs. It formulates clearly the user requirements in the area of phylogeny and classification queries. It then reports on the use of warehousing techniques in the integration of data from many sources, to satisfy those requirements. It shows how to perform query expansion with synonyms and vernacular names, and how to implement hierarchical query expansion effectively. A detailed analysis of the improvements offered by those query expansion techniques is presented. This is supported by the exposition of the database techniques underlying this development, and of the user and programming interfaces (web services) which make this novel development available to both end-users and programs.
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