Overview PlantCollections – Publish information about public garden collections – Using existing infrastructure Morphbank – Goals and capabilities of project – Recording support for scientific inference Some examples of existing infrastructure that are easy to use – Emphasis on people and their interactions with information and each other

PlantCollections Collaboration of 18 public gardens which aims to present information about plant diversity Publication of information from existing plant records: information about – DNA, images, seeds, herbarium vouchers, living plants Use of existing technologies – BG Base and other primary plant record databases – Google Base as information repository – Morphbank as image repository – Web portal developed by Dave Vieglais and Pathfinder

Morphbank Project Repository of images of organisms 220,000 images so far Each image has a context: Specimen, taxon, locality, specimen part, view angle, etc. Repository of information related to the images Specimens, localities, users, groups, taxa, annotations, collections Owner, group, date, permissions Unique identity for each object All objects are connected through collections and associations (aka annotations)

Morphbank Project Improve support for specific biology research activities – Proposal addressed 3 specific research activities Develop infrastructure – Those activities could be improved by a collaborative, Web-based information system Involve a multi-disciplinary team – Biology: zoology, botany, paleontology – Computer Science – Information Science

Creating an Information Model for PlantCollections Survey of information managers from the gardens – What fields of data do they have? Survey of users from 8 domains – Taxonomy, horticulture, conservation science, ecology, weed science, education, gardeners, garden visitors – What information do they need? Committee to create federated schema – Evaluate surveys – Create criteria for inclusion based on availability and need

Information Transfer in PlantCollections BG Base databases (and others) have primary data – Dump to CSV file Requires field selection – Transform to XML Customized code – Push to Google Base Standard Google Base is the aggregator and publisher – Accept insert and update documents – Maintain information for Web sites Morphbank is the image repository and publisher – BG Base databases export image and image metadata to Google Base – Google Base pushes image and metadata to Morphbank Integration – Development of portal for search and display

Existing Infrastructure for Image Display Showing images through plugin DO NOT TRY THIS NOW Cooliris.com provides an image plugin Page that shows images exposes an RSS feed using MediaRSS RSS feed provides thumbnail and larger image for each item Search page, result thumbnails and image display follow Another example from type=Image&keywords=ctol&limit=100&firstResult=200&format=thu mb type=Image&keywords=ctol&limit=100&firstResult=200&format=thu mb This URL is a search of Morphbank for CTOL (Cypriniformes Tree of Life) images with a presentation of the results as a thumbnail page

Search with Thumbnail response Search page RSS Feed Cooliris link Results page

Cooliris Image Viewer

Geolocating objects in Google Maps Using GeoRSS namespace for presenting lat/long Paste RSS feed URL into the Google Maps search field – Pins on map for each geolocated item – Each pin includes a link to the home page for the item

Sample RSS Feed Keyword query Search Results for keywords 'alaska' Calamagrostis canadensis with id Morphbank Calamagrostis canadensis with id Morphbank