You can now watch a 6 minute presentation on the features of SilverCollection. This video will show you how we are making use of the latest technologies to bring an interactive experience to specimen data.
SilverBiology will be exhibiting at Botany 2008 in Vancouver Monday July 28th - Wednesday July 30th. We will be demonstrating SilverCollection, our web portal product for biological collection, as well as talking about some new services on the way for 2009. Look for our booth at the conference and make sure to stop by and say hi.
We are happy to present another new feature for SilverCollection. We continue to develop new tools and features to our software based on feedback from our clients. One of our recent requests was to support more browsing features and specifically being able to browse around with the collectors. So what we have come up with is a new browse feature that does just that. Currently we have 2 new methods of looking through the collection.
The first method is by Last Name. Simply choose the starting letter (A) then check or descend down a particular path to see what this person has collected (B). At any time one or more items can be checked to instantly display those results. You can always mix match with other information in the different sections of the browsing tool for more flexibility and instant results.
The second method is by date range. Currently we support century and decades. For more specific ranges I would recommend using the search tool for more exact breakdowns. Here we can do the same as the “by Last Name” except we have a filter for any collector that has collected specimens in the collection related to the decade that we are looking at. In the below example we are looking at 7 specimens of Fimbristylis in the 1920’s from collector Brown, Clair.
The collection information is based on to values derived from the Collectors field and the EarliestDateCollected. Both are based on the DarwinCore 1.4 format and work under the same constraints.
After several requests for tracking support for SilverCollection it has finally arrived. SilverCollection has now been configured to support Google Analytics for logging information about visitors actions.
We are pleased to be exhibiting at the NSCA–SPNHC 2008 Joint Meeting in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (May 13th–17 th, 2008)
If you are attending please stop by our booth and let us show you a presentation on SilverCollection.
For more information about the convention visit: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/nsca-spnhc
We will also be at the Herbarium Curators/TORCH Meeting on Saturday May 18th, 2008
We are happy to announce the release of SilverCollection v1.0. SilverCollection is an interactive web portal for herbaria and other biological collections. It is a client-specific customized application for online access to specimen data. This application provides an interactive solution for curating, searching, and browsing your collection records.
To find out more about the software visit: collection.silverbiology.com
The first beta release of IE8 is out and we wanted to see what new tools could be achieved for Biodiversity Informatics.
We decided to try out the new IE8 Activities. Activities are contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage. In this case we decided to see how we could easily highlight a LSID and quickly get related information from its Authority.
Try our LSID Resolver Activity by visiting our LSID section.
http://lsid.silverbiology.com/
| ABCD | Access to Biological Collection Data. See http://www.bgbm.org/TDWG/CODATA/Schema/default.htm. |
| Access Point | The URL (web address) of a Web Service. |
| Backus-Naur Form | a metasyntax used to express context-free grammars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus-Naur_form. |
| BioCASe | Biological Collections Access Service. See http://www.biocase.org. |
| CNS | Concept Name Server. A service to get information about existing conceptual schemas and their concepts. |
| Concept | Definition of a property, class or relationship. |
| Conceptual schema | A formal definition of concepts. It can also be seen as a data model or ontology. |
| Data source | The term used in the BioCASE project for an access point. |
| Dublin Core | Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. See http://dublincore.org |
| DiGIR | Distributed Generic Information Retrieval. See http://digir.net. |
| Federation schema | A conceptual schema adopted by a federation. |
| GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information facility. See http://www.gbif.org. |
| GET | HTTP communication method where form data are encoded as parameters in an extension to a URL. The GET method is principally used to transmit requests for data to a web server (e.g., a simple database search). |
| HTML | Hypertext Markup Language. A subset of Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), used for authoring pages for the World Wide Web. |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer protocol, the commonly used protocol for transmitting requests and documents between applications on the World Wide Web. |
| KVP | Key-Value Pair. One of the possible encodings for TAPIR requests. |
| OGC | Open Geospatial Consortium. See http://www.opengeospatial.org. |
| OMG | Object Management Group. See http://www.omg.org/. |
| NCD | Natural Collections Descriptions. A TDWG emerging standard for describing collections of natural history material. See http://www.tdwg.org/NCD/TDWG_NCD_Subgroup.htm. |
| normative | Referring to a standard or set of norms that are understood to be correct. A normative document is one which describes how things ought to be and why. |
| Output Model | An XML schema language (or potentially other) formatted response structure. |
| POST | POST is an HTTP communication method that can include any kind of data or command. The data are encoded separately and do not form part of the URL as in a GET message so this method is better for complex, sensitive, lengthy or non-ascii data. |
| protocol | An agreed format for transmitting data between two or more devices. |
| Provider | Originally defined as an organisation hosting either a DiGIR or a BioCASe service. In the context of TAPIR, an organisation hosting a TAPIR access point, which may point to several data sources. |
| Provider software | Software running on a web server that facilitates access to data. |
| RDF Schema | A language for describing vocabularies in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). See http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/. |
| SDD | Structure of Descriptive Data. A TDWG, XML-based interoperability standard for descriptive data. |
| SOAP | Simple Object Access Protocol, an XML-based messaging protocol used for invoking web services and exchanging structured data. |
| TAPIR | TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval. |
| TCS | Taxonomic Concept Transfer Schema. An XML schema for the exchange of taxon concepts. See http://tdwg.napier.ac.uk. |
| TDWG | Taxonomic Databases Working Group. See http://www.tdwg.org/. |
| TSA | The Species Analyst, a research project developing standards and software tools for sharing biodiversity information. See http://speciesanalyst.net/. |
| UDDI | Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. UDDI is a specification for maintaining standardised directories of information about web services. |
| URL | Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a resource on the Internet |
| URI | Uniform Resource Identifier. A formatted string that serves as an identifier for a resource, typically, but not exclusively, on the Internet. URIs are used in HTML hyperlinks. |
| W3C | World Wide Web consortium. See http://www.w3c.org. |
| Web Service | A service based on Internet Protocols, such as HTTP, SMTP or FTP, and also based on XML. |
| WFS | Web Feature Services. An Open Geospatial Consortium XML-based standard to enable transfer of geographic feature data using Geography Markup Language (GML). See http://schemas.opengis.net/wfs/. |
| wrapper | Software that allows standardised queries to be run against an underlying database. |
| WSDL | Web Services Description Language. An XML format for describing Web Services as a set of end points operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. WSDL is the language used by UDDI. |
| XMI | XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) is an OMG standard for exchanging metadata information via XML. See http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/xmi.htm. |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language developed by the W3C. A means of tagging data for transmission, validation and manipulation. See http://www.w3.org/XML and http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml. |
| XML Schema | A formal definition of the required and optional structure and content of XML formatted documents within its domain. See http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema. |
| XPath | Defines a way of locating and processing items in XML documents by using an addressing syntax based on the path through the documents logical tree structure. See http://www3.org/TR/xpath. |
| XQuery | XML Query Language. A W3C specification for querying XML formatted data. |
MuGAl (Multi-Gene Alignment) is an online service that is specifically designed for large and cumbersome multiple gene datasets. This online service offers the ability to align your datasets automatically or manually with the facility offered by programs such as Se-Al (http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/seal/) or MacClade (http://macclade.org/macclade.html).
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