The EDIT developer wiki now contains a new introduction to the planned Community Websites that allow webpublication of taxonomic data.
http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CommunityWebsites
The HTML compilation and link collection of relevant European databases on environmental and biological data (http://edit.csic.es/Databases.html), includes:
- Databases on surface units (administrative units and regular equal-area units): Sources of the GIS layers of surface units available at the Geoplatform (http://edit.csic.es/).
- Databases on environmental data: Sources of the GIS layers of environmental variables available at the Geoplatform, together with other interesting databases on various environmental issues at the global and European extent.
- Databases on biological data: Taxonomic databases for the whole biota of for specific groups.
EDIT geoplatform (http://edit.csic.es/GISdownloads.html) provides standard GIS layers of surface units (countries, squares, ...) to evaluate the spatial distribution of occurrence data -spatial completeness-, and standard GIS layers of environmental variables (climate, topography,...) to evaluate weather occurrence data represent adequately the gradients of environmental variation -environmental completeness-.
The report C5.45 (Identified and described suitable taxonomic tools), the cybertaxonomic platform architecture changed from a set of loosely coupled already existing taxonomic tools (geographic, descriptive, publishing, etc.) to a system based on a common data model (CDM) which uses the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and builds the ground for other applications interfacing with core CDM based data storages.
The Component can be downloaded here.
This document outlines the means of linking search results in the Virtual Taxonomic Library (ViTaL), currently at the initial stages of development at the Natural History Museum (London) with content held in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), an important and growing repository of freely available taxonomic literature, which will be one of the sources available for searching by ViTaL users.
A draft collections development policy is also included.
The component can be downloaded here.
This document sets out an analysis of the results of the requirements gathering phase carried out by staff at the Natural History Museum (London) for the ViTaL bibliographic data and literature search tools project.
The requirements where collected through a combinations of consultations with taxonomists and library staff, and also though a questionnaire circulated to subscribers of the Taxacom mailing list. The collected responses to the questionnaire and additional comments can be seen in EDIT Component C5.18 ViTaL requirements report.
The component can be downloaded here.
Software recommendations for system components of ViTaL, the Virtual Taxonomic Library, are as follows:
1 Bibliographic reference harvesting, aggregation and search modules
• The choice of application server framework and language is still open and will be decided in consultation with the development team.
2 Web application framework
• Drupal with standard and bespoke modules.
3 Metasearching and linking
Ex Libris Group applications
Metalib for metasearching, with the X-Server API module
SFX OpenURL link resolver and context management tools
Few years ago, we have developped a querying on exported data from BG-BASE and direct link to images.
Many specimens have been encoded in BGBase and more than 20.000 of them have been digitized.
Here is a link to a short demo: http://www.br.fgov.be/tap/query.html
Since several months, another colleague is developping a brand new project: "The Virtual Herbarium"
The technology used to implement the project: PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL.
The search criteria are: Genus, Species, Country, Type specimen, Collector, Barcode number etc...
The current component captures all details of existing software processes, that are practiced for inventorying purposes under the taxonomic researcher community.