MorphBank: Web Image Database Technology for Biology
Fredrik Ronquist1, David Gaitros2, Austin Mast3 (Presenting)
1 School of Computational Science and Information Technology, Florida State University, USA.
2 Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, USA
3 Department of Biological Science, Florida State University, USAThe development of fast Internet connections and the availability of low cost, high quality digital imaging techniques is revolutionizing research and teaching in disciplines that rely on the interpretation of macroscopic and microscopic observations. This is manifest in the recent, rapid proliferation of 2D- and 3D-image databases on the web. MorphBank is a searchable web repository of biological images with features suited to biodiversity studies. Work is underway to add sophisticated community annotation technology to MorphBank, which will allow users to link their observations to particular pixels in images, without compromising the original image file, and search and annotate each other's observations. The history and objectives of MorphBank, applications of the new annotation technology, the design of a new image-handling client, and the outcomes of the September 2004 Biological Image Database Workshop at Florida State University will be discussed.