EDIT WP5 Platform for Cybertaxonomy

The Global References Index to Biodiversity (GRIB) prototype by the Head office of the Common Library Network GBV (VZG) is the joint literature index of EDIT’s Virtual Taxonomic Library (ViTaL) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe (BHL-Europe). The GRIB has now been greatly enhanced by adding the bibliographic records from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), including hyperlinks to the digitised items.

EDIT exemplar groups as well as several other initiatives have now started to use the CDM taxonomic editor as their primary software tool for data capture and maintenance of their community information stores. In the course of their work several demands on new features and refinements of existing functionalities were made. The feature requests were thoroughly analyzed and discussed with the WP5 developer group and led to a significantly revised Editor design and implementation, which will be part of the EDIT Platform version 3 to be released in September 2010.

This report is to get an idea of the time, hardware and Software requirements for setting up and installing a MapViewer Tool mirror. It includes recommendations for the future use and sustainability of the service. This report has been compiled by James Davy and Franck Theeten with input from Patricia Mergen, and colleagues of the EDIT project.

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Several tools already exist to manage descriptive data or to use and to analyse these data(Xper², DiversityDescriptions, Linnaeus, or other tools). These tools have hence proven their interest and their accessibility for taxonomists even if they have little or no previous computer experience.

The general objective of the activity covers the design of a security infrastructure and the introduction of a secure Single Sign-On service (SSO) for the platform. The task to be achieved within the forth JPA concerns the integration of EDIT service providers within the Community Single Sign-On (CSSO) security infrastructure. CSSO enables the various EDIT service providers to protect their services and resources defining individual access control policies, while users can access different services using only one identity.

The prototype service to generate printed publications from the CDM (Printservice) consists of an interface that lets a user select a classification or specific parts of a classification, a system to harvest the required data from the CDM REST Services (Webservice) and XSL stylesheets to process the acquired data into the Open Document Format (ODF). Being a prototype, the system does not claim to be complete, correct or useful in production use.

The Pan European Species directories Infrastructure (PESI, www.eu-nomen.eu/pesi/) develops and integrated access system to the three major European taxonomic checklists Euro+Med PlantBase (ww2.bgbm.org/EuroPlusMed/), Fauna Europaea (www.faunaeur.org/), and the European Register of Marine Species (ERMS, www.marbef.org/data/erms.php). Additional European checklists will follow as soon as the basic infrastructure has been established.

This report is based on Skype and Chatzy talks that took place on the 26^th of March 2010 as well as e-mail correspondence on the EDIT Geo developers mailing list. It was compiled by Marcin Gąsior (MIZPAN) with a generous input from Patricia Mergen (RMCA) , James Davy (RMCA), Franck Theeten (RMCA), Alexander Kroupa (MFN) and the colleagues from the EDIT developer mailing list.

This report describes the methods of inventory completeness assessment developed in the EDIT geoplatform tools and presents a spatial analysis based on ATBI data. It has been compiled by Marcin Gąsior (MIIZPAN) with a generous input from Pere Roca Ristol (CSIC), Alexander Kroupa (MFN), Patricia Mergen (RMCA) and the colleagues from the EDIT developer mailing list. The incompleteness of species inventories due to limited field sampling is considered as an important issue in many biodiversity studies.

The present component details the collaboration between the activity 5.6 (description and keys) and an EDIT exemplar group (the Cichorieae exemplar group). For activity 5.6, the aim of this collaboration is the visibility of the integration of descriptive data into the EDIT Common Data Model (CDM). For the Cichorieae exemplar group of the WP6, this collaboration could help to get the best of their descriptive data and better fit the needs of the Cichorieae Dataportal website users.