SilverCollection - Web Portal for Biological Collections

SilverBiology will be exhibiting again this year at the SPNHC 2009.  The conference is to take place on July 6th - 11th, 2009 in Leiden, Netherlands.

Bridging Continents presents new, large-scaled infrastructure projects in natural history collections, the state-of-art in collection care and best practice, the latest on digitization of collections and much more. http://www.spnhc2009.org

We will be showcasing our newest version of SilverCollection, our web portal for biological collections.  We have a new api and some great new features we are excited to show off.

We have also been doing research in fuzzy matching for scientific names and will be showing how TAXAMATCH web service can be used to help with scientific literature.

If your museum has an Arthropod, Herbarium, or other start to a digital collection we really want to speak with you during the meeting. We have some additional tools coming out this year that should help with imaging and processing scientific data.

We strive to build good working relationships with museums to improve our software, create open source tools, and offer custom solutions to your specific needs.

See you there!

Last week was the fourth gathering for Nomina.  These meetings have been created by EOL & GBIF in collaboration with BHL (Biodiverstiy Heritage Library).  The goal for this meeting was to improve Taxonomic Name Recognition, discover the tools and algorithms that are currently being used and how to merge and improve what we are currently doing to make things faster and better.  With over 35,000 books and more then 14 million scientific pages from the BHL it is important to provide the most accurate tools to help discover information from the past.

The workspace used for this meeting includes links to web applications, source code, shared dictionaries, test files, and other useful resources for those in need of tools and services for finding, parsing, and processing taxonomic names. http://code.google.com/p/taxon-name-processing

The meeting was very productive and as changes and improvements are made to the individual projects the overall goals will be one step closer.

SilverBiology’s purpose at this meeting was to demonstrate and see how our TAXAMATCH web service can be used with fuzzy matching on scientific names that are misspelled.  Our goal is to implement this with the Global Names Index (globalnames.org) and GBIF’s species checklist.  These will be public web services so anyone can use to search for scientific names.

TAXAMATCH was originally developed by Tony Rees at OBIS and developed in PL/SQL.  Our open source version is a PHP/MySql implementation of the algorithm with a few additional configurations.  To learn more about Tony’s project and the continuation of our project just follow the links below.

Original TAXAMATCH: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/taxamatch.htm
Our web service version: http://taxamatch.silverbiology.com (IN DEVELOPMENT)

If you would like to see more about the past Nomina workshops you can find them here:

Nomina 4: http://hickory.eol.org:8081/display/public/Nomina+IV
Nomina 2: http://blog.eol.org/2008/04/24/nomina-2-workshop-succeeded

SilverBiology is pleased to announce the expansion of our company to the European Universities and Museums to support their biological collections. Our new office is located in Sevilla, Spain.  At the moment we are looking at the current status of collections and will be introducing ourselves to many of the universities in the near future.

We are excited to introduce Maciej Wyszkowski to our team.  He is the European Regional Manager of SilverBiology and will be overseeing the biodiversity needs in this part of the world.  If you are interested in speaking with him on how SilverCollection, our web portal for scientific collections, can work with your collection please contact us now. To view a full list of all our current services please visit: http://www.silverbiology.com/products

You are also welcome to discuss any projects that you need help with or integrating with current standards and technologies.  Our focus is to provide open source and licensed based software tools to provide solutions for scientific goals throughout the world.

You may contact us at: http://www.silverbiology.com/company/contactus.php

We will be attending the SPNHC2009 (6 - 11 July 2009, Leiden, The Netherlands). You can also find out about our future events at: http://www.silverbiology.com/company/events.html