1 / 19

A Biodiversity Content Management System for Research, Education, and Outreach

A comprehensive system for managing biodiversity content, supporting research, education, and outreach efforts. Accessible to diverse users, it addresses problems in biodiversity databases and allows for data entry, retrieval, and customization. Supported by a multi-use database, the system enables maximum access and minimum barriers to change.

mjo
Download Presentation

A Biodiversity Content Management System for Research, Education, and Outreach

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. A Biodiversity Content Management System for Research, Education, and Outreach Cynthia Sims Parr University of Maryland, College Park Co-authors Roger Espinosa, Tanya Dewey, George Hammond, Phil Myers, of University of Michigan University of Michigan Museum of Zoology

  2. Biodiversity Biodiversity is the extraordinary variety of all life on Earth - from genes to species to entire ecosystems. -- Smithsonian Institution Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program

  3. Access Access

  4. Change Change

  5. Diverse users Policy makers Land-use planners Educators, students Laypersons Biologists Complex databases Organism names Habitats Conservation status Reproductive parameters Interactions, etc. Specimen-level and aggregated Problems in Biodiversity Databases • Changes over time and in different locations • Changes in our view of what scale is important • Ecological dataset volume rapidly increasing • Changes in technology • Who will maintain these knowledgebases?

  6. More general scientific data management questions How to design a back-end so that contributors can easily enter data, and end-users can easily retrieve what they want, data managers can make big and small changes How to use the same system for multiple constituent groups • research • education on different levels • outreach to the public

  7. Animal Diversity Web introduction http://www.animaldiversity.org Geographically and taxonomically global High traffic, 70,000 pages per day From educational  outreach  science

  8. Animal Diversity Web challenges Data entry Student contributors Lack domain expertise, technical expertise Few repeat contributors Completeness, Structuring Single template covering all animal phyla would have unnecessary keywords and sections for most taxa Data retrieval To support inquiry education or science, must be able to get data out via queries Users diverse so may not have knowledge of controlled vocabulary What happens when underlying data model changes?

  9. ADW’s “loosely coupled” architecture • Nodes separately managed from • identifiers used to relate and display them • Template • Taxonomic names • Stylesheets Weinberger, 2002

  10. Taxonomic MySQL database Sources Walks Common names ITIS EMBL reptiles SI mammals Howard & Moore birds CAS fishes

  11. Creating content Register for workspace Identify subject Receive customized template (increasingly more structured) Text, keywords, data fields Attach references Review, edit, publish

  12. e.g. template section customized for Aves XML template Taxon filter Taxon Filtering for customized templates

  13. Workflow, legacy content Change template elements If new content: receives new template Legacy objects remain semantically tagged for display and search New template elements available for ADW editors

  14. Content display for different audiences http://biokids.umich.edu http://www.animaldiversity.org

  15. A multi-use database supporting maximum access and minimum barriers to change Content all managed in the same system, with multiple displays (loose coupling, taxon filtering, customized stylesheets) Complex object templates can be created or modified, but legacy data remains semantically marked up and thus available for display and querying New style sheets, updated taxon data Where do we go next?

  16. ACCTTGAGATAG ACCTTGAGATAG ACCTTGAGACAG Vertical integration Example: Biologist studying genetic basis of a behavioral trait that varies across Animalia. From http://www.geog.ouc.bc.ca/physgeog/contents/9o.html

  17. Natural history ontology from Animal Diversity Web + SEEK ecological ontologies + Animal Behavior ontology (for more information, see me) + Gene Ontology ….

  18. Scaling, engagement, and interoperability • Contribution model scales well • User involvement fosters engagement • Accessible resource for science

  19. Acknowledgements • ADW team: particularly Phil Myers, Roger Espinosa, Tricia Jones, Tanya Dewey George Hammond • BioKIDS team: particularly Nancy Songer • Ontologies: Peter Midford and Jennifer Golbeck • NSF IERI (UMich) and ITR (UMd) grants Ontologies, manuscript, and presentation can be found at http://www.animaldiversity.org/site/about/technology/

More Related