Geoinformatics: Collaborative Research: Neotoma Paleoecology Database, Pliocene-Quaternary

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Neotoma is a multiproxy relational database that includes fossil data for the past 5 million years (the Pliocene and Quaternary). It is a community database that provides the underlying cyberinfrastructure for a variety of disciplinary database projects. The Neotoma project is an international collaborative effort among individuals from 23 institutions, including domain scientists representing a spectrum of Pliocene-Quaternary fossil data types, as well as experts in information technology (IT). This project builds on the initial development of the Neotoma database, which was funded in 2008 with a 2-year grant from the NSF Geoinformatics program. Neotoma involves domain scientists representing a wide spectrum of fossil groups from the Pliocene and Quaternary teamed with information technology (IT) professionals from the Center for Environmental Informatics (CEI) at Penn State, where the database is hosted. A workshop was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC on 31 January-2 February 2009 to plan for the future development of Neotoma. This project is the outgrowth of the DC workshop.During a 2-year development project, the database structure of Neotoma was designed and implemented with the import of vertebrate faunal data from the FAUNMAP database and pollen data from the Global Pollen Database. The North American Plant Macrofossil Database was updated, and data are now ready for import. The Neotoma website was launched, and the Neotoma explorer provides a map-based interface to the data.During the next phase ( this project) several new constituent database cooperatives from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia will join with Neotoma, and several new data types will be ingested, including diatoms, ostracodes, insects, and testate amoebae. Neotoma will be exposed to outside developers via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a Software Development Kit (SDK), whereby both desktop and webbrowser- based applications can acquire data from Neotoma over the Internet. Data-steward tools will be developed that will allow stewards to upload and update data remotely. This project establishes working groups for various database activities, including development of software tools, development of age models, integration of various fossil types from packrat middens held in different databases, and organization of a new peatlands constituent database. Two database-wide workshops will be held for coordination, planning, and conceptual development.