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Integrating Biodiversity Heritage Literature into the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy
Last modified: 2011-09-10
Abstract
The EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy, http://wp5.e-taxonomy.eu/), henceforth called “the Platform”, provides taxonomists and life scientists in general with a set of interacting tools for full, customised access to taxonomic information. The Platform covers the whole spectrum of the taxonomic workflow: fieldwork, editing and analysing data, assembling treatments, collaborating in teams, and efficient publishing both to the web and in printed form. Among these components are the EDIT CDM (Common Data Model) DataPortal for web publication and the EDIT Taxonomic Editor, a data entry and manipulation tool, which captures the taxonomic workflow in software.
One of the fundamental resources of taxonomic work is literature. Projects like the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL, (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/) and BHL-Europe (http://www.bhl-europe.eu/) are mobilising this vital resource by assisting natural history institutions and libraries in digitising scientific literature and by making it available in a digital library. Access to literature resources is made possible within the Platform by a central component, the Virtual Taxonomic Library (ViTaL). ViTaL is based on the Global References Index to Biodiversity (GRIB, http://grib.gbv.de/LNG=EN/) jointly realised by EDIT and BHL-Europe. The GRIB incorporates bibliographic data from EDIT and BHL-Europe partner’s library catalogues, which represent much of the biodiversity literature of the world. When these catalogues are harvested, duplicate records are detected and resolved by the creation of unified bibliographic records. The original records of the individual library catalogues are also preserved and stored. The GRIB serves as an access point to these records as well as a proxy to the digitised publications freely available in the global BHL infrastructure. It lists the libraries where the physical publications can be found, and it also relates which libraries offer access to commercial digital literature. Publication records can also be tagged for future digitisation.
Platform components like the EDIT Taxonomic Editor and the EDIT DataPortal provide seamless access to the bibliographic data provided by BHL . This includes functionalities to directly search on the bibliographic index to retrieve bibliographic records and links to the digitised literature. This interoperability has been achieved by making use of the OpenURL web services offered by BHL. All bibliographic information provided by BHL can be directly reused in the EDIT Taxonomic Editor. Similar integration with BHL-Europe has been prepared by making use of the SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) web service provided by the GRIB, but is not yet available in production. This integration was made possible by the close collaboration of the EDIT and BHL-Europe projects.
One of the fundamental resources of taxonomic work is literature. Projects like the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL, (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/) and BHL-Europe (http://www.bhl-europe.eu/) are mobilising this vital resource by assisting natural history institutions and libraries in digitising scientific literature and by making it available in a digital library. Access to literature resources is made possible within the Platform by a central component, the Virtual Taxonomic Library (ViTaL). ViTaL is based on the Global References Index to Biodiversity (GRIB, http://grib.gbv.de/LNG=EN/) jointly realised by EDIT and BHL-Europe. The GRIB incorporates bibliographic data from EDIT and BHL-Europe partner’s library catalogues, which represent much of the biodiversity literature of the world. When these catalogues are harvested, duplicate records are detected and resolved by the creation of unified bibliographic records. The original records of the individual library catalogues are also preserved and stored. The GRIB serves as an access point to these records as well as a proxy to the digitised publications freely available in the global BHL infrastructure. It lists the libraries where the physical publications can be found, and it also relates which libraries offer access to commercial digital literature. Publication records can also be tagged for future digitisation.
Platform components like the EDIT Taxonomic Editor and the EDIT DataPortal provide seamless access to the bibliographic data provided by BHL . This includes functionalities to directly search on the bibliographic index to retrieve bibliographic records and links to the digitised literature. This interoperability has been achieved by making use of the OpenURL web services offered by BHL. All bibliographic information provided by BHL can be directly reused in the EDIT Taxonomic Editor. Similar integration with BHL-Europe has been prepared by making use of the SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) web service provided by the GRIB, but is not yet available in production. This integration was made possible by the close collaboration of the EDIT and BHL-Europe projects.