Report prepared for the Experts Meeting Towards the Implementation of a Global Invasive Species
Information Network (GISIN), 6-8 April, 2004. Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Page 41
8/30/2004
Complex routing is supported in that the
information does not necessarily need to be
obtained directly from the database server.
Web Services has a highly scaleable setup,
which is especially important in addressing
the question of finding out where the
information is located and this is more or
less true of any registry mechanisms.
Several projects are currently implementing
Web Services or include activities related to
it. The Science Environment for Ecological
Knowledge (SEEK) project is a very large
four or five year project, originating at the
University of Kansas and involving the
inventors of DiGIR. Jim Quinn and Jim
Hendler are the Principal Investigators for
the Spatial Image Retrieval Engine (SPIRE)
project.
In Europe, the Task Group on Access to
Biological Collection Data (ABCD) is
developing more sophisticated access to
collection data than that provided by the
Darwin Core schema. The Taxonomic Data
Working Group (TDWG) is developing a
standard that GBIF will be examining for
descriptive data. This standard is concerned
with how you describe data. So for example,
it makes no attempt to say what a taxon is
or what a character is, but rather how you
can make shared vocabularies that users,
machines especially, can compare to one
another.
Some cool projects
•
SEEK; James Beach (KU), Matt Jones (NCEAS), Bertram
Ludaescher
(SDSC)
–
Ecological knowledge management; semantic web;
Ecology Metadata Language (EML); predictive distribution
modeling; deducing taxonomic concepts (vs. names)
•
SPIRE; Jim Quinn (UC Davis), Jim Hendler
(UMD)
–
Semantic web; developing a framework for integrating
public information on invasive species, biodiversity,
vegetation, watershed analysis, and projecting future
impacts of growth
•
BioCase
ABCD; Walter Berendsohn
–
Access to Biological Collections Data (Darwin Core on
steroids…)
•
TDWG Structure of Descriptive Data (SDD)
–
XML Schema that provides a standardized mechanism for
specifying controlled vocabularies about taxa, characters,
and identification keys.
Why
•
Huge base of existing standards-based
software support on both server and client
side.
•
Web Services are transport agnostic: http is
not a required transport method, e.g. email,
tcp/ip, JMS, …all do fine.
•
Routing is supported.
•
Scalability, especially for discovery
–
(True of any registry mechanism)
•
Reduces federation issues entirely to the
content.
–
Biologists: you can run but you can’t hide!
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