Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Crowd Sourcing and Community Management Capabilities Available within Symbiota Data Portals
Nico Franz, Corinna Gries, Edward Gilbert

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-29 12:00 PM – 12:10 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-05

Abstract


Symbiota (http://symbiota.org/tiki/tiki-index.php) is an open source software designed to promote and facilitate collaboration among those working to document biodiversity. Symbiota has become increasingly popular in recent years in North America, due in part to its suitability to support large herbarium networks and NSF-sponsored Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs; see https://www.idigbio.org/content/thematic-collections-networks). The specimen-based Content Management System (CMS) provides a shared platform allowing researchers to manage biological resources as an integrated network. Data management through a community-based system has allowed for the development of several features and workflows that have enhanced efficient data entry while improving overall data integrity and quality. On-line data entry directly from an image of the specimen label allows for label transcription and error resolution that can call upon a global user community. A novel crowd sourcing feature in Symbiota offers collection managers the ability to submit specimen label images to a queue for group data entry by a volunteer task force. To improve efficiency and quality, the user interface incorporates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, as well as duplicate and exsiccati record harvesting and real-time data validation. The duplicate clustering module groups duplicate specimen records across institutions, thereby obviating the need to re-enter a previously processed specimen and enhancing the task of locating and resolving misidentified specimens, viz. by highlighting the most recent annotation events within a cluster. As an additional review step, collections can opt to allow registered users to fix basic errors if and when they encountered them. Collection managers have the ability to review, approve, or revert such edits. Several other novel community features are available through Symbiota, including an integrated loan management module and pre-accessioned data entry by the original collector. We will demonstrate and discuss these features, their underlying concepts, implementation, utility, and future steps to further augment the community of contributing users.