19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Poster, Interoperability

Keeping Biological Information Systems (BIS) Open and Simple

Peter T. Strobl, Mag. rer. nat. (peter.strobl@sbg.ac.at)
Arbeitsgemeinschaft fuer Vegetationsoekologie, Fachbereich fuer Organismische Biologie und Oekologie, Paris Lodron Universitaet Salzburg, Austria

Biological Information System (BIS) is the name of a thoroughly XML-based database management system for improving scientific workflow at the Department for Organismic Biology and Ecology, University of Salzburg. When reengineering the system from scratch, we payed special attention to adhere to open standards wherever possible and remain platform independent in various ways. The system consolidates several, previously independent database systems for taxonomy, syntaxonomy, and distribution data from different sources in and around Austria. Even though BIS uses common interface and data representation standards, we believe it is not a desirable aim to strive for homogenizing the scientific database landscape using only one system type or exchange path. In contrast, we decided to research on simplifying interoperability of specialized biological systems. The atomic system entities of such networks should not cover all possible functionalities, but only those which are really needed, still maintaining the option to add or replace some modules at a later point. Considerations on "return of investment" topics play a central role in our system architecture; scarcely used components tend to pile up a big amount of wasted development ressources. On the other hand, the system should remain manageable and understandable by its target user group, biologists with usually little professional information science expertise. We do not consider graphical user interfaces to be the cure-all to this challenge. Nowadays, when choosing technologies and implementation strategies carefully, we believe it is possible to remove a lot of the complexity of open standards for the user, and finally require only common computer operation experience to deal with the system. Examples for this approach will be given. Because of the above outlined topics the main goal for biological information systems of our type shall be to keep things simple as possible. BIS' design rules enable access to information system technologies even to low-budget research, whether in "developing countries" or in the "first world". To these scientists we freely offer BIS know-how to promote scientific workflow and networking in new ways and to make a small contribution for freeing scientific work from financial obstacles. The author is looking forward to having open discussions on this and other related subjects.