Since our public announcement at TDWG 2009 we have had the chance to talk with a number of large and small collections interested in this method and technology for processing herbarium label images. It is our goal to implement an international service that can help all herbaria.
Another session of Nomina has been concluded. EOL was nice enough to again host this workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. This time the focus was on methods for reconciling heterogeneous taxonomic data. The group this time was made up of myself from SilverBiology, GBif, EOL, and Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).
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
Have you ever been doing field research, had your GPS, and searched for a locality or species? Well, what happens when you find and record the coordinates then later have no idea which county you where in?
Ever wanted to know where all the historical plants are stored? How about bugs, insects, spiders, butterflies, or fish? Well with the help of Biodiversity Collection Index (BCI) and their wonderful resources of information we are finally able to get a true interactive visualization of how our world is collected and where that information is housed.
Visit the Interactive Map (http://labs.silverbiology.com/biocol)
Research into biodiversity relies on the use of specimens. These specimens are held in reference collections around the world. BCI is a central index to these collections. With the help of BCI’s Web Services, SilverBiology was able to use its new open source web tool SilverMapper to easily map the location of these collections.
This data source is directly based on the data from the Biodiversity Collection Index (BCI) and all geospatial data is estimated on Google Maps reverse geocoding service to establish a latitude and longitude.
We wanted to show a real world example of our new program SilverMapper and at the same time provide something useful for the community. Comments and suggestions are welcome. I would also like to thank Roger Hyam for all his hard work over at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh for really bringing the Biodiversity Collection Index together. I hope this little demonstration will encourage collection managers to update their information with the exact latitude and longitude position at BCI to help provide the precise location of where people can find their collection.
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.
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 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/
