EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy is a suite of loosely coupled tools and services working together to support and optimize the taxonomic workflow. The core components of the platform from a user perspective are the CDM community stores which act as central data stores and are based on the Common Data Model (CDM). Several documentations are available for the different ways the community stores can be used.

The Biodiversity Service & Application Tracker (BD tracker) is a collection of links to software, tools and resources useful to taxonomists (see also: M5.20a BD Tracker launched). The BD tracker was setup in the first project year and is now a Drupal based website: http://www.bdtracker.net.

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Literature is one of the fundaments of a taxonomist’s daily work. The Virtual Taxonomic Library (ViTaL) is to provide seamless access from within the EDIT Platform components to library catalogue and digital literature services. ViTaL is therefore a key component of the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy. Moreover, the CDM Data Stores are valuable repositories of bibliographic information linked to taxa, and in contrast to library catalogues the records are often on the level of individual articles rather than entire journal or book volumes.

Many institutions and organizations throughout the world offer taxonomy related data online. One of the objectives of EDIT is it to ease the process of integrating such data into the taxonomist’s every day workflow. IT tools currently used by taxonomists usually do not have specific functionality to easily integrate such data. Instead either advanced IT knowledge is needed or work intensive and error-prone processes such as copy & paste have to be employed to transfer and transform data.

Functionality and usability testing has been carried out to assess the performance and intuitiveness of the Taxonomic Editor. This report describes the testing process and presents summaries of the data collected. Raw data can be found in the separate Appendix document.

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The release of the EDIT Platform 3.0 was focusing on technical improvements but also aimed in bringing the software to the scientific community. This necessitated increasing the dialog with existing and with new users in order to fulfil the special requirements of the different user communities. Despite the increased challenges many improvements have been implemented into the DataPortal software and into the CDM web services.

The document explains the configuration options and is structured as a step-by-step guide with text as well as screenshots of the interface elements. Following this guide, the user is able to produce pre-formatted text from a CDM data store using the EDIT Taxonomic Editor. The steps describe how the user interface may be started, how the connection to a particular print publication service is set up, and the selection of data for output as well as additional configuration options.

The general objective of the activity covers the design of a security infrastructure and the introduction of a secure Single Sign-On service (SSO) for the Platform. The task to be achieved within the fifth JPA concerns the integration of a Community Single Sign-On (CSSO) security infrastructure within the Platform. The CSSO enables the various EDIT service providers to protect their services and resources defining individual access control policies, while users can access different services using only one identity.

The Community Single Sign-On (CSSO) enables the various EDIT service providers to protect their services and resources defining individual access control policies, while users can access different services using only one identity. The security infrastructure bases on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol family. In particular, SAML provides a federation concept to realise the community aspect.

The Global References Index to Biodiversity (GRIB) prototype (http://grib.gbv.de/) is being implemented by the Head office of the Common Library Network (VZG). For exporting data the GRIB offers a Search/Retrieval via URL interface (SRU) which allows CDM based EDIT platform components to find data in the GRIB and retrieve those in several standard formats. On the other hand the GRIB can harvest and import data from the CDM store via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).