Harvard University is awarded a grant to design a prototype of an innovative web services network using peer to peer technology for collecting and aggregating community knowledge about specimens held in biodiversity collections. This system will transform the query-based, unidirectional flow of collections data in current distributed networks to a bidirectional flow of information. The proposed network can form a backbone for the collation of community knowledge, and the push of annotations and corrections back to the institutions that hold the information on individual specimens. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts ? Boston.
Biological specimens held in museums are the repositories for our knowledge of diversity, evolution, and distribution of organisms. The quality of data associated with specimens in these collections is highly variable and under constant review by specialists. Over the last three decades, many collections records have been captured into electronic databases, and more recently, networks of web services have been developed to provide public access to these data. Widespread availability of collections data and unwarranted assumptions about the quality of those data can lead to false conclusions in analyses of those data. Quality control for the information associated with biological specimens is thus becoming essential. A central problem for the next generation of distributed biodiversity informatics tools is how to push corrections, annotations, and new information developed by the global research community back into the databases of individual collections.
