Collaborative Research: Data Integration for Repository Services in Biodiversity Informatics

佛罗里达州立大学、德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校和堪萨斯大学正在合作创建一个分布式信息系统，该系统整合了基于图像的形态数据，以改进物种和标本鉴定。为了实现这一目标，该项目结合了现有的三种信息资源，包括：数字图像库(Morphbank)、生物采集管理系统(Specify)和本体管理系统(Morphster)。这些系统的互操作性将被用来整合各种大大小小的生物信息库。该项目创造了一种导致长期稳定的经济模式。对生物多样性研究界的好处将是更容易收集、组织、管理和共享研究信息，以及更容易发现和重新利用来自其他研究项目的信息。该项目将通过协调使用三个项目来基于标本和图像创建丰富的形态数据实例，从而证明该方法的有效性，这将提高标本鉴定的质量，并在本体论术语的应用方面提供更大的一致性。该项目团队将使用Specify中的标本元数据和Morphbank中的图像来说明美国东南部520种豆科植物的特征状态数据矩阵。遗留的角色和状态描述将合并到Morphster本体中，并绑定到Morphbank中的图像注释。这些注释将提供给所有三个系统的用户，以便研究人员能够找到符合他们研究需要的样本。Morphbank(http://www.morphbank.net)，)中的图像和注释、Specify(http://specifysoftware.org)，)中的标本数据以及Morphster(http://morphster.org))的本体浏览功能为教育工作者提供了宝贵的资源，并为科学界与公众之间的交流提供了工具。该项目将与布罗根艺术与科学博物馆(佛罗里达州塔拉哈西)合作，培育和增强这些固有的优势。对于那些对识别未知生物感兴趣的人来说，组合系统将是有价值的工具，包括潜在有毒、入侵、濒危或敏感环境指标的物种。

"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.