The Specify Software Project has created 'Specify Labs', an area on the web site dedicated to illustrating new technologies and capabilities we are exploring. The "Specify Labs" is linked off a menu item on lower left of this page.

Specify Droid

We recently prototyped a version of Specify for mobile phones. Specify Droid would run on any Android (Google) operating system phone and enable custom phone display layout, data form customization, database lookups, and uploading to data repositories.

Specify Droid takes advantage of GPS functions and photo capabilities of Android phones to capture geo-references and images, and embeds them within the collection sample metadata. With Specify Droid, biological inventory and survey researchers as well as general biodiversity collectors would have the end-to-end capability to acquire specimen and species observation data on a highly portable cell phone, and then pipeline that information through Specify's uploading and validation steps to ingest field collection information into a research database.

We invite you to take a look at a simple prototype of Specify Droid on the Specify Labs page. We welcome potential usage scenarios or functional requirement suggestions for Specify Droid and for the other capabilities demonstrated in Specify Labs.