Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Africa (formerly America del Sud)
Date: 2013-10-30 04:45 PM – 05:00 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-08
Abstract
eMonocot (http://www.e-monocot.org) is an online biodiversity information resource about monocot plants. It integrates communities of taxonomists, providing tools and support to help them manage their data and in doing so contribute to eMonocot.
With over 276,000 taxa (90,000 accepted) in the monocots and with ambitious targets to meet within the funded period, we were unable to simply scale up the approach taken in earlier pilot projects. Instead, we were required to develop a scalable, efficient, flexible and automated system that could be sustained.
Over thirty independent communities contribute data to eMonocot, many of which were not intended to be aggregated in this way, leading to a heterogeneous and sparse dataset. We have used the Darwin Core Archive standard and shared identifiers as common framework across communities and systems to allow us to accommodate the data and present it as a coherent online treatment. The heterogeneous nature of the data drove design decisions about the interface as well as the back-end processing.
By developing a single harvesting process that was used and refined repeatedly throughout the project and by developing features that allow the eMonocot system to function with minimal human support we have tried to ensure that it can be sustained once the funded period ends.