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In 2000 work on a system to handle herbarium material was started at the University of Vienna. The preconditions were to setup a client server system without any client installation but simply using commonly available web browser software. The second point was to base the system on open source software so to be able to reduce licence costs and put main emphasis into tailoring efforts. The architectural concept at early stages has foreseen the possibility to host data for multiple institutions but in parallel providing access to the records of all participating institutions. The modular system is composed of modules for literature citations, specimens, geographical entities, and a comprehensive module for taxonomy which allows the distinction between nomenclatural information, (multiple) taxonomic concepts, systematic classifications and floristic aggregation of taxa.

Since the start the number of partners increased to nine international institutions (4 austrian, 4 german, 1 montenegrinian, 1 afghanian) and its content is visible online @ herbarium.univie.ac.at/database/search.php - summing up to a quarter million records. The potential when fully deployed digitization is in place would be about 11,5 million records. Since a high percentage of type material is extant in the partners institution (calculated beteen 3-7(-10) %) a comprehensive nomenclatural referencing system has been integrated with the possibility to link a specimen to the protologue. The major institutions have been connected ab initio to the GBIF network via installation of the BIOCASE provider software.

New developments at the software side include the integration of fuzzy matching tools (ported from Tony Rees’s Taxamatch), integration of external webservices such as the Catalogue of Life, and FaunaEuropaea which are in parallel integrated into the names reconciliation processes within the GBIF-AT framework, lookup of geographical place names via webservices provided from www.geonames.org,person names from www.viaf.org, languages provided by www.geolang.com . In the near future material from BHL will be fully integrated to get a direct linkage for taxa to published materials.

 

Architectural Concept: MySQL MultiMaster einvronment – Dev / Test / Live System

Software development Open Source: code is freely available @ Sourceforge – project FReuD http://sourceforge.net/projects/freud/

Connection to aggregators: GIBF - www.gbif.org , GBIF-AT – www.gbif.at , CoL – www.catalogueoflife.org , JSTOR-Plants - http://plants.jstor.org/, Europeana - http://europeana.eu/

Integration of fuzzy matching - http://herbarium.univie.ac.at/taxamatch/taxamatchMdld.php with bulkuload capabilities http://herbarium.univie.ac.at/taxamatch/bulkupload/bulkupload.php

Integration of external services BHL / BHL-E; CoL, PESI, PlantList, Tropicos, IPNI, WCSP, Euro+Med, …