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From archives to apps, the story of VertNet
Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: America del Nord (Theatre I)
Date: 2013-11-01 11:00 AM – 11:15 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-09
Abstract
VertNet is an open source project on GitHub that is focused on making it easy and fast to access huge amounts of Darwin Core data via the web. These data have multiple uses in biodiversity science, ranging from species distribution modeling, to assessing range shifts, to determining phenological events such as emergence times. As VertNet surpasses 100 million records from over 100 participating institutions and still growing, the VertNet technical architecture is built to handle big data by leveraging technologies like the Integrated Publishing Toolkit, MapReduce, CartoDB, Amazon CloudFront, and Google App Engine. In this talk we will present the VertNet technical architecture in two parts: the data architecture and the application architecture. The data architecture handles harvesting, processing, and indexing Darwin Core Archives into the cloud. The application architecture handles providing fast and easy search, download, and access to these indexed data for building the next generation of biodiversity web applications and Application Programming Interfaces. We will also demo the VertNet portal and some new features, like spatial, tissue, and media search and integration with GitHub for tracking data issues submitted by the community.