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!

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.

Why did we do this?

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.