19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Interoperability

Building a biodiversity content management system for science, education, and outreach

Cynthia Sims Parr (csparr@umd.edu), Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Univ. of Maryland, USA
Roger Espinosa, Tanya Dewey, George Hammond, and Philip Myers, Museum of Zoology, Univ. of Michigan, USA

Efficient access to natural history data about organisms is important to at least three audiences: 1) the scientific community, especially those seeking coded data for large scale ecological or organismal analyses, 2) educators and learners in formal education settings, and 3) the general public.  In this paper we describe the system architecture and data template design for an online resource serving all three audiences. Animal Diversity Web's architecture combines relational databases and an XML data template to present targeted views for diverse audiences. Content resources are managed separately from the identifiers used to relate and display them. The resulting infrastructure supports highly scalable and flexible resource building. Content and views for all three audiences are managed in a single system.  Changes in data models have not resulted in lost legacy data, and new views of the content are easy to create.  The system has been functioning well since its public implementation, handling large volumes of traffic and three rounds of content contribution.  A machine-readable semantic description of our data model, together with a description of our data template development process, can assist other ecologists and biologists developing data models and also makes the contents of our database accessible to other computer systems.