EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The EDIT platform for Cybertaxonomy is a suite of loosely coupled tools that already exist or are newly developed. As a central structure for storing data and exchanging them between applications a “Common Data Model (CDM)” has been developed. Newer applications directly work upon this data structure and for this purpose use the CDM Library, a Java based framework to persist and access CDM data. However, many tools exist that are not yet based on the CDM or don’t support its data exchange format CDM XML. Data created with these tools need to be transformed properly.

The EDIT platform for Cybertaxonomy is a suite of loosely coupled tools that already exist or are newly developed. The development of new tools and the development of adapters for the integration of existing tools take place in several EDIT partner institutions. The coordination of the EDIT software development is carried out by the BGBM (task 5.2) and reported and discussed in the ISTC (Information Science and Technology Committee).

The labour- and time-intensive back and forth between taxonomist and publisher is one of the bottlenecks in the taxonomic workflow. Furthermore, where print publication are created from a database, the final editing stages often involve only formatted print output. This results in inconsistencies between database and final print output.

The CDM community store acts as a central data store for versionable Common Data Model data. The RESTful web services to access the community store had been implemented as proposed at http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CommunityServer. In order to meet the advanced requirements of the EDIT Platform 2.0 the services have been revised and subsequently adapted to the CDM version 2.0.

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The CDM Framework is a Java-based programming library that offers all functionality needed to persistently store data based on the Common Data Model (CDM), to edit the data and to make it available for other applications and thus to the public.

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One task of work package 7 is the establishment of “All Taxa Biodiversity Inventories + Monitoring” (ATBI+M) sites in protected areas. ATBI+M are large-scale efforts to record, identify, and document the entire biodiversity of a given area. EDIT's ATBI+M sites differ from traditional approaches in their longer-term orientation: from an initial species inventory, they will form the basis for monitoring biodiversity changes over time. Active European ATBI+M sites are located in France, Italy and in Slovakia.

In January 2008, the first Version of the Common Data Model (CDM) was frozen and documented at http://wp5.e-taxonomy.eu/cdm/v1/. This first version is based primarily on experiences using existing data models and formats. It attempts to cover all fields related to taxonomy, so that data coming from different applications can be stored and accessed via a single
database.

The CDM Framework is a library that offers all functionality needed: to persistently store data based on the Common Data Model (CDM), to edit the data and to make it available for other applications.

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.

As documentation system for the platform the same TRAC Wiki is used that also serves as a project management tool for the platform development. TRAC is one of leading project management tool for software development. The site can be visited at http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/PlatformArchitecture and all its sub sites.