Data Set Conversions

For the last month the Specify Project has continued to work on data set conversions from Specify 5 and other legacy formats to Specify 6. Theresa Miller is managing communications and scheduling of conversions and she has been contacting collections who have risen to the top of the queue. If you have a question about converting data to Specify 6, please contact Theresa (specify@ku.edu, Tel: 785-864-4400).

Specify 6.1.08 Coming

We are completing a new maintenance release which will address a small number of significant issues. Specify 6.1.08 will also include support for formulaically constructing taxon name strings of author names and any determination qualifiers (sensu, vide, cf., etc.) for use in printing specimen labels. The new release will also update the Specify database schema with the addition of some fields. Performance enhancements include having locality data appear much more quickly on collection object screens.

Specify + Morphbank + Morphster

We are also currently working with the Morphbank Project (Greg Riccardi, PI, Florida State Univ., www.morphbank.net) on an NSF jointly-funded project to connect Specify and Morphbank through web services to allow Specify institutions to opt-in to archiving and cataloging specimen images in Morphbank automatically. Depositing copies of Specify image attachments in Morphbank which will allow researchers searching for specimen images to use a centralized web portal and image index to see what is available across all Morphbank collections. And we will link Specify databases to Morphbank in the opposite direction, so that Morphbank users can obtain specimen details from Specify installations for any images they discover through the Morphbank portal. Integration with Morphster (Dan Miranker, Univ. of Texas, www.morphster.org) for ontology-based searching of Morphbank images is also a part of the three-way collaboration. We are wracking our brains to name the chimera: Sporphster? Morphify?

Botanical Specimen Data Entry

We also have a collaboration underway with Íñigo Granzow de la Cerda of the University of Barcelona, to develop user interfaces and logic within Specify 6 to support botanical specimen data entry from specimen label images. The focus of the work will be supporting data entry workflows with efficient and continuous user interface support for obtaining the images, attaching them to WorkBench and Collection Object records in Specify, keystroking data from the images, and then archiving (and serving) them through Specify and Morphbank. As part of this project, we are also researching technologies for producing a browser interface for data entry and editing with Specify 6 and for enabling Specify to query GBIF and other remote databases to hunt down previously-cataloged duplicate specimens.

Funding

Our NSF renewal proposal for core Specify Project support is pending. We're looking forward to the possibility of news about that soon.