FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, THE
Grant: $483,582 - National Science Foundation - Aug. 4, 2009
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Award Description: Florida State University is awarded a collaborative grant to create a distributed information system that combines digital image repositories, biological collection management system and ontology management systems. The interoperability of these systems will be leveraged to enable the integration of a wide variety of large and small repositories of biological information. The project collaborators, Gregory Riccardi and Austin Mast of the Morphbank project at Florida State University, Daniel Miranker of the Morphster project at the University of Texas at Austin, and James Beach of the Specify project at the University of Kansas, represents biodiversity projects that have had significant impacts on the management of information for researchers. The major innovations of this project will include providing extensive interoperability between resources, finding ways to allow smaller repositories to interoperate, and creating an economic model that leads to long-term stability. This project will create an infrastructure that will bring these capabilities to reality for the biodiversity informatics community. The benefit to the biodiversity research community will be the increases ease of collection, organization, management, and sharing of research information and the increased ease of discovering and re-purposing information from other research projects. Specific biodiversity research goals of the project include coordinating the use of the three projects to create a rich example of morphological data, based on specimens and images, which will improve the quality of specimen identifications and provide greater uniformity in the application of terms from ontologies. Professor Mast and his students will illustrate a character state data matrix for the 520 southeastern US species of legumes using specimen metadata in specify and images in Morphbank. The legacy character and state descriptions will be incorporated into Morphster ontologies and tied to image annotations in Morphbank. These annotations will be available to users of all three systems, so that researchers will be able to find specimens for their research needs. The image and annotations found in Morphbank, the specimen data in specify, and the ontology browsing capabilities of Morphster provide valuable resources for educators and tools for communication between the scientific community and the public. This project will foster and augment these inherent strengths in collaboration with the Brogan Museum of Arts and Sciences (Tallahassee FL). The combined system will be valuable tools interested in identifying unknown organisms, including species that are potentially toxic, invasive, endangered or sensitive environmental indicators.
Project Description: We started on August 1, 2009 and currenlty have two part time employees working on the project. The first phase of the project is underway. One initial goal is the creation of additional hosts for the Morphbank image repository. Significant modifications to the software have prepared it for the initial installations.
Jobs Summary: This project allowed us to create one temporary support position while retaining one faculty position and additionally retaining one temporary support position. (Total jobs reported: 1)
Project Status: Less Than 50% Completed
This award's data was last updated on Aug. 4, 2009. Help expand these official descriptions using the wiki below.
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