EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The services provided by ViTaL have been discussed in detail in previously published project documents. The diagram below has been extracted from document D5.15 ViTaL draft system design. It provides a useful overview of the system architecture. This report documents the pilot launch of the literature metasearch component of ViTaL, hosted at the Natural History Museum (London). The pilot went live on 26 September 2008.
Functionality

ViTaL, the Virtual Taxonomic Library is a component of the EDIT infrastructure, being created as part of WP5.3, which is concerned with the provision of Bibliographic tools for the taxonomic community.

The services provided by ViTaL have been discussed in detail in previously published project documents. The diagram below has been extracted from document D5.15 ViTaL draft system design. It provides a useful overview of the system architecture.

ViTaL, the Virtual Taxonomic Library is a component of the EDIT infrastructure, being created as part of WP5.3, which is

The 3rd ISTC meeting was held on October 1-2, 2008 at the Department of Biodiversity Informatics and Laboratories at Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin. The 3rd ISTC report and the presentations given at the meeting are available on the WP5 webpage http://cybertaxonomy.eu/blog/2007/04/04/istc.

This report has been compiled by Dominik Mikiewicz (MIZPAN) with contribution made by users of the wp5-geo-edit@mnhn.fr mailing list, especially Andreas Müller (BGBM), Pere Roca (CSIC) and Pablo Sastre Olmos (CSIC)

The ViTaL metasearch service uses the standard Z39.50 protocol to send queries to online public access catalogues (OPACs). ViTaL uses this facility to allow the querying of EDIT partner library resources, hence the need for these libraries to supply the relevant connection information to the ViTaL team.

To ensure the future compatibility of the platform with other initiatives in the world, it was decided to integrate the existing tools into the cybertaxonomy platform by using a unique already-existing public standard exchange format for descriptive data: the TDWG-SDD XML schema. This choice was made in accordance with the late efforts of several existing tools (DiversityDescriptions, Xper², Lucid, FRIDA) to allow interoperability with SDD.

The original EDIT platform for cybertaxonomy as planned in the initial description of work was designed as a set of loosely coupled independent biodiversity informatics applications communicating via well defined interfaces. This architecture has dramatically changed during the first project year towards a set of applications being built around a common data model (CDM) which is the basis for data processing in the entire platform (http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CommonDataModel#CDMVersion1.0). This decision changed also the design of the “taxonomic core components” from an autonomous application and database system for capturing and maintaining taxonomic core data (names, taxa, synonymies, etc.) into an integrated part of the CDM-based platform.

The CDM community store acts as a central datastore for versionable Common Data Model data. Web services to access the community store have been implemented as proposed at http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CommunityServer.