Our vision of the Humboldt Digital Library goes beyond the traditional system. Humboldt's idea of interconnectedness requires a system of flexible navigation from any point in the digital library to any other related point within or outside Humboldt's works. A further innovative feature of this dynamic system is that it can recreate the context of a particular passage and make it possible to view images, interactive maps, and information about plants, animals, and scientific facts relevant to Humboldt's observations. Although the digital library contributes by making rare books accessible, the greatest advantage of the system will be its capacity to connect data from diverse locations in Humboldt's twenty-nine volumes and allow comparison with modern scientific knowledge and developments. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is a five year initiative designed to create cyberinfrastructure for ecological, environmental, and biodiversity research and to educate the ecological community about ecoinformatics. SEEK participants are building an integrated data grid (EcoGrid) for accessing a wide variety of ecological and biodiversity data and analytical tools (Kepler) for efficiently utilizing these data stores to advance ecological and biodiversity science. An intelligent middleware system (SMS) will facilitate integration and synthesis of data and models within these systems. The three components of the SEEK cyberinfrasture are: (1) the EcoGrid, (2) a Semantic Mediation system, and (3) an Analysis and Modeling system. These infrastructure components will be built with input and participation from three SEEK working groups: (1) Knowledge Representation, (2) Biological Taxonomy and Classification, and (3) Biodiversity and Ecological Analysis and Modeling. ... [Information of the supplier]
A functional prototype of the Biodiversity-Exploratory Information System (BExIS) has been established by Dr. Jens Nieschulze and colleages (group leader Prof. Dr. Ernst-Detlef Schulze), MPI Biogeochemistry Jena. The system is heavily used within the project "Biodiversity Exploratories", mostly by the resources and map functionality but increasingly also by its data management capabilities. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe) is a 3 year project, involving 28 major natural history museums, botanical gardens and other cooperating institutions. The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world’s published knowledge on the discovery and subsequent description of biological diversity. However, digital access to this knowledge is difficult. The objective of the BHL-Europe project is to make available Europe’s biodiversity information to everyone by improving the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries. The project will provide a multilingual access point for biodiversity content through a global portal (BHL) with specific biological functionality and to a wide European cultural audience through Europeana. ... [Information of the supplier]
After three decades of standards development and computerization of natural history collections many millions of vouchered specimen records are available in global electronic networks. Vast numbers of specimen records remain only accessible on paper. Available records are highly variable in quality and rich in three decades worth of data capture and migration errors. Far more seriously, specimen data is being brought to the desktops of the researchers and specialists best able to correct and clean those data, without an easy means for the return of those researchers' corrections to those specimen collections. It is this very annotation by specialists that keeps natural history collections vital. We are designing and implementing a network, which we term Filtered Push, to connect remote sites where annotations can be generated with the authoritative databases of the collections holding the vouchers to which those annotations apply. ... [Information of the supplier]
The DINA project develops an open-source Web-based information management system for natural history data. At the core of the system is support for assembling, managing and sharing data associated with natural history collections and their curation ("collection management"). Target collections include zoological, botanical, geological and paleontological collections, living collections, biodiversity inventories, observation records, and molecular data. DINA is primarily intended for large installations servicing the collection management needs of a country, a region, or a large institution. DINA is developed by the DINA consortium, an unincorporated international partnership among organizations and individuals for collaborative open-source development. The DINA consortium was founded in 2014 by six natural history collection institutions in Europe and North America and is open to additional members as detailed below. The DINA acronym stands for "DIgital Information system for NAtural history data", and has its roots in a Swedish initiative to replace a heterogeneous collection of unsustainable in-house databases with a modern, Web-based national collection management system. ... [Information of the supplier]