ITR/IM(BIO): Biodiversity Data Discovery and Integration

地球上生命的巨大多样性反映在关于物种的网络信息的多样性上。这些信息通常很难找到，使用起来也不友好。对科学家有用的网页对学童来说往往是无法访问的，而教育网页通常对研究没有兴趣。不同于库存充足的建筑供应仓库中的部件，关于生物的数据库和网页很难定位并组合成连贯的结构，该项目使用组件体系结构来无缝集成生物多样性网络信息。它引入了构建块来定位物种名称的起源和权威，提取物种分布的地图，并提供了细节，通过这些细节，无关的数据库和网站可以进行合作。这是通过使用XML实现的，这是一种可扩展的标记语言，已在Web的其他部分用于解决类似的问题。该项目开发了XML网关，使不能生成XML的数据源变得灵活，并提供同一数据的多个视图。例如，为了说明它的广泛用途，该框架将提供给一群与生物学本科生和研究生一起工作的学校教师，以制作一份可在网上访问的波士顿哥伦比亚点栖息地的野外指南，以及供课堂使用的课程材料。

The tremendous diversity of life on the planet is mirrored by the diversity of web-based information about species. This information is often difficult to find and unfriendly to use. Web pages that are useful to scientists are often inaccessible to schoolchildren, and education pages usually hold no research interest. Unlike the parts in a well-stocked building supply warehouse, the databases and web pages about organisms are difficult to locate and combine into coherent structure.This project uses a component architecture to integrate biodiversity web information seamlessly. It introduces building blocks to locate the origin and authority of a species name, to extract maps for species distribution, and provides nuts and bolts by which unrelated databases and web site can be made to cooperate. This is achieved through using XML, the eXtensible Markup Language that has been used in solving comparable problem in other parts of the web. The project develops XML gateways to make flexible the data sources not able to produce XML and provides multiple views on the same data. This accommodates different purposes, educational background and ages, for example.To illustrate its broad utility, the framework will be provided to a group of school teachers working with biology undergraduates and graduate students to produce a web-accessible field guide to the habitats of Columbia Point, Boston, together with curricular material for classroom use.