Electronic Field Guide: An Object Oriented WWW Database to Identify Species and Record Ecological Observations

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The Electronic Field Guide (EFG) project will provide a web- accessible distributed object oriented database for the identification of biological specimens from field observations. The data, including both taxonomic and environmental or ecological data, wi ll aid in iden- tification by building a context for each observation. The database will also support the recording of multiple observations, so that larger-scale ecological studies can be carried o ut using the data. This project will complement the traditional book format field guides, and extend their utility by addressing certain problems inherent to the format. These prob-lems include long time lags in preparation, expense of production, and the broad geo-graphic scope usually necessitated by economic considerations. EFG exploits the flexibility and the ease of updating inherent to the electronic format. This project will complement the traditional book format field guides, and extend their utili ty by addressing certain problems inherent to the format. These problems include long time lags in preparation, expense of production, and the broad geographic scope usually necessitated by economic considerations. EFG exploits the flexibility and the eas e of updating inherent to the electronic format. EFG will use Object Oriented Database technology to provide mechanisms by which biol-ogists can extend the description of the data itself to include the ecological and taxonomic attributes they deem appropri ate to the particular collection of species they wish in the database. The underlying descriptions will be specified in the ACS Reference Model for Biological Collections. These descriptions will allow multiple EFGs to connect to one another or to other d atabases, using protocols which will be developed, tested and pub-lished. The EFG software design rigorously separates the data models from the database and from the user interface, thereby supporting multiple views of the data for differing research and e ducational purposes. Demonstration of this separation is a key goal of the project. Ini-tially, EFG will be deployed in Monteverde, Costa Rica, to record the 700 species of but- terflies and 3000 species of plants in their environment. The utility of the r esulting database will be evaluated in relation to traditional book-based identification.