Specify at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, 17-21 October, New Orleans and Specify 6.4 Preview

Several members of Specify Project staff will be participating in the TDWG Annual Meeting next week, including Rod Spears, Tim Noble, Andy Bentley, Ben Anhalt and Jim Beach. Project presentations include demonstrations of a new workflow for specimen label image acquisition using a WiFi camera and the Specify WorkBench. Also, we will present 'Scatter Gather Reconcile' (SGR), a new network module for discovering duplicate specimen data in GBIF and for re-using them in specimen digitization workflows. SGR was developed in collaboration with Inigo Granzow de la Cerda, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Andy Bentley is running a half-day Specify training workshop and a drop-in help desk session. We are also meeting with several software development and support partners including Nelson Rios and DJ Abibou of the GEOLocate Project, Greg Riccardi from Morphbank, Willem Coetzer from the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, as well as web client software development collaborators from the Swedish Natural History Museum, Fredrik Ronquist, Kevin Holston, Torsten Eriksson and Ida Li.

Specify 6.4 will be the next release; it will be available in November as a major update. We are enthused by the innovative and integrative new capabilities Specify of 6.4, including the SGR module, a major refresh of GEOLocate which is completely embedded within the Specify user interface, and new web services integration with the mapping services of the Lifemapper Project (www.lifemapper.org). Integration with search, visualization and computational web services is the common theme among these significant new modules in Specify 6.4. In the future, we will deliver much more web-based integration within Specify Windows, Mac and Linux clients as part of co-development partnerships and leverage the intellectual and engineering investments other projects have made in developing biodiversity and collection research services.

A one-page handout for Specify 6.4 developed for the TDWG 2011 meeting is here. Additional information and documentation on Specify 6.4's capabilities will be available soon.