Biodiversity Information Infrastructure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA)
Franck Theeten, Bart Meganck, An Tombeur, Danny Meirte, Patricia Mergen, Michel Louette
Abstract
This poster will describe the technical infrastructure installed at the RMCA and show our contribution to biodiversity information networks such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, http://www.GBIF.org) and the global network of herpetological collections (HerpNET, http://www.herpnet.org ).
This infrastructure is built on the foundation of a combination of several databases and web-services, which were developed and installed at different times, and which must meet both internal needs (curatorial management, extensive taxonomical description for the researcher) and external needs (integration of the data into standards currently in force within the scientific community for the exchange of taxonomical and geographical information).
We will consider the following points:
- A presentation of the data standards used by RMCA for the exchange of taxonomical and geographical information, and their corresponding network protocols.
- The issue raised by the interaction between a legacy system that contains the reference data and providers using modern data standards based on XML in order to connect networks of distributed databases.
- A presentation of the contribution of the RMCA to the development of new protocols such as:
o SYNTHESYS –NAD 3.7 (Itineraries): Project for the visualisation and assessment of the accuracy of geographical data on collector’s pathway. (http://synthesys.africamuseum.be/). This is a GIS project based on the analysis of historical data and whose purpose is the determination of several possible alternative routes followed by a collector during a collecting event.
o Herpnet: Presentation to GBIF and Herpnet of RMCA’s Herpetological collections (http://www.herpnet.org/portal.html, http://data.gbif.org/datasets/provider/147).
o GNOSIS, a Web Map Server implementation financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office, developed collaboratively by major Belgian scientific institutions (the RMCA, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and the Royal Meteorological Institute) and the IT company GIM (Geographic Information Management) (http://www.gnosis.be).
o MIDAS: a project managed by the RMCA for the development of a centralized database for taxonomical data, gazetteers and curatorial data, which features a scalable on-line interface, and standardized instructions for taxonomical operations (such as synonymy and check on the availability of names).
- We will review the advantages of the modular architecture which is used in the tools developed by the TDWG (DiGIR, TAPIR and BioCASe): the lifetime of each module is improved as the underlying database containing the data and the application which centralizes the research of data by the means of a common interface and a central register for the indexation of data are kept separated. This architecture allows the contributing institution to retain the intellectual property of its data and to keep the control over its technical implementation.
However, the preparation of the data and the mapping of fields into the web-service may require a considerable preliminary work, and we will discuss techniques improving the development time while keeping the structure of the original data intact with the use of SQL views and functions.
This infrastructure is built on the foundation of a combination of several databases and web-services, which were developed and installed at different times, and which must meet both internal needs (curatorial management, extensive taxonomical description for the researcher) and external needs (integration of the data into standards currently in force within the scientific community for the exchange of taxonomical and geographical information).
We will consider the following points:
- A presentation of the data standards used by RMCA for the exchange of taxonomical and geographical information, and their corresponding network protocols.
- The issue raised by the interaction between a legacy system that contains the reference data and providers using modern data standards based on XML in order to connect networks of distributed databases.
- A presentation of the contribution of the RMCA to the development of new protocols such as:
o SYNTHESYS –NAD 3.7 (Itineraries): Project for the visualisation and assessment of the accuracy of geographical data on collector’s pathway. (http://synthesys.africamuseum.be/). This is a GIS project based on the analysis of historical data and whose purpose is the determination of several possible alternative routes followed by a collector during a collecting event.
o Herpnet: Presentation to GBIF and Herpnet of RMCA’s Herpetological collections (http://www.herpnet.org/portal.html, http://data.gbif.org/datasets/provider/147).
o GNOSIS, a Web Map Server implementation financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office, developed collaboratively by major Belgian scientific institutions (the RMCA, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and the Royal Meteorological Institute) and the IT company GIM (Geographic Information Management) (http://www.gnosis.be).
o MIDAS: a project managed by the RMCA for the development of a centralized database for taxonomical data, gazetteers and curatorial data, which features a scalable on-line interface, and standardized instructions for taxonomical operations (such as synonymy and check on the availability of names).
- We will review the advantages of the modular architecture which is used in the tools developed by the TDWG (DiGIR, TAPIR and BioCASe): the lifetime of each module is improved as the underlying database containing the data and the application which centralizes the research of data by the means of a common interface and a central register for the indexation of data are kept separated. This architecture allows the contributing institution to retain the intellectual property of its data and to keep the control over its technical implementation.
However, the preparation of the data and the mapping of fields into the web-service may require a considerable preliminary work, and we will discuss techniques improving the development time while keeping the structure of the original data intact with the use of SQL views and functions.