EUGEN KARL KEMPF, THE MAN BEHIND THE KEMPF DATABASE OSTRACODA

ITIS, WoRMS, EOL, iBOL, GBIF, ANTABIF, OBIS. FlyBase, FishBase, FosFARbase, Fauna Europaea. World Modem Foraminifera Database, EDNA Fossil Insect Database, European Diatom Database, The Reptile Database, Mammalian Species of the World. Today's biologists are blessed with databases, and there is no doubt about their relevance for scientific work. (Palaeo-)Biologists put a lot of time and efforts into establishing and maintaining a multitude of databases, not to mention their endeavours to raise funds for this work. Many databases are produced and edited by a multitude of authors and editors, providing a great amount of data being supplied to the project within a short period of time all too often at the expense of quality. The recent success of databases is intrinsically tied to the increasing access to, and use of, the World Wide Web, and it comes as no surprise that only few such biological databases have been initiated prior to the late 1990s. A rare example of an evidentially long-standing, relational database, authored and managed by an individual expert of a crustacean class, is the Kempf Database Ostracoda. Prof. Eugen Karl Kempf, now celebrating his eightieth anniversary, started data compilation in the 1960s as a card index and innovatively switched to a machine punch card system in the 1970s. Ever since the first publication from his taxonomic-bibliographic database in 1980, ostracod researchers worldwide benefitted from an ineffably high amount of, currently, more than 285 000 datasets of highest integrity. It is time to honour the person behind the Kempf Database Ostracoda.