Papers and Posters

Abstract

Technical introduction to the BioCASE software modules
Döring, Markus & Güntsch, Anton. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin Dahlem, FUB Department of Biodiversity Informatics and Laboratories, Königin-Luise-Str 6-8, D - 14191 Berlin

The Biological Collection Access System for Europe, BioCASE, is aimed to provide public online access to descriptive data about collections (meta-level data) as well as to individual specimen or observation records (unit-level data) of collection holders. The meta-level network is based on 31 National Nodes managing their own database about collections within their country. Unit-level data providers in contrast are on the Internet and can be directly accessed via the BioCASe protocol. Both meta- and unit-level networks are up and running, with the later being just recently established including a preliminay user interface to demonstrate functionality while the BioCASE portal is being developed.

The demonstation will focus on the technical parts of the project and demonstrate some of the software modules developed so far. A system overview will be given as well as some insight to the different individual components - mainly addressing the networking aspects of the architecture, which make extensive use of XML. The proposed TDWG collection data standard ABCD is being used to transfer data from data providers to the user interface. This ABCD XML document is generated by a CGI/XML database interface written in Python, whereas the software modules responsible for the central communication and management of distributed queries are written in Java using threads. The protocol used for this communication is derived from the DiGIR project. The WWW User Interface will be supported by a variety of other modules, namely a thesaurus and an indexing module.

For further details see the developer pages at http://www.biocase.org/dev/