After a wonderful week in Montpellier, France and listening to some very interesting talks it’s time to get back to the daily grind and continue our developments. Before we do, I wanted to recap on some of the activities SilverBiology was involved in.
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
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.
