Collaborative Research: Data Integration for Repository Services in Biodiversity Informatics

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"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."Florida State University, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kansas are collaborating to create a distributed information system that integrates image-based morphological data to improve species and specimen identification. In order to accomplish this, the project combines three existing information resources including; digital image repositories (Morphbank), biological collection management systems (Specify) and ontology management systems (Morphster). The interoperability of these systems will be leveraged to enable the integration of a wide variety of large and small repositories of biological information. The project creates an economic model that leads to long-term stability. The benefit to the biodiversity research community will be the increased ease of collection, organization, management, and sharing of research information and the increased ease of discovering and re-purposing information from other research projects.The project will demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by coordinating the use of the three projects to create a rich example of morphological data, based on specimens and images, which will improve the quality of specimen identifications and provide greater uniformity in the application of terms from ontologies. The project team will illustrate a character state data matrix for the 520 southeastern US species of legumes using specimen metadata in Specify and images in Morphbank. The legacy character and state descriptions will be incorporated into Morphster ontologies and tied to image annotations in Morphbank. These annotations will be available to users of all three systems, so that researchers will be able to find specimens for their research needs. The images and annotations found in Morphbank (http://www.morphbank.net), the specimen data in Specify (http://specifysoftware.org), and the ontology browsing capabilities of Morphster (http://morphster.org) provide valuable resources for educators and tools for communication between the scientific community and the public. This project will foster and augment these inherent strengths in collaboration with the Brogan Museum of Arts and Sciences (Tallahassee, FL). The combined systems will be valuable tools for those interested in identifying unknown organisms, including species that are potentially toxic, invasive, endangered, or sensitive environmental indicators.