Electronic Field Guides: Leveraging Biodiversity Data with the Web and Mobile Tools

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The Electronic Field Guide Project will provide a web-accessible, distributed object-oriented database for the identification of biological specimens and also electronic methods to record field observations. The system uses Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), either alone or in conjunction with GPS units. The data management and software technologies are extensible and can be used by other developers for new applications or to add value. The user interface is designed for communicating with humans, but the rest of the software is machine-based. The components will enable users to discover and integrate biodiversity data anywhere on the internet, convey information about quality of the data, and deal with data that may be sensitive. Using XML, the components provide access to a wide variety of biological collection data sources, as well as to much government and museum data sources. Three communities of user partners are involved in the development and testing, including field biologists, naturalist educators, and community science projects.