Formulated and Specify: Using Visual Programming to Enable Web-based Biodiversity Analysis

Missouri University Of Science And Technology, Rolla MO

Investigators

Abstract

Biological collections document the occurrence and distribution of life on earth. A vast amount of taxonomic and ecological information is associated with the estimated three billion specimens in museums worldwide. The informatics challenges the biodiversity research community faces with collections data are a consequence of numerous autonomous database systems and an absence of software tools to track and analyze changes in those databases. Time series and regional analysis of biodiversity, based on actual collections data within a distributed computing environment on the Internet, represent the grand challenge for the biodiversity research community. The distributed computing framework developed herein will provide a powerful infrastructure for the integration of data sources and for the data analysis objectives of biodiversity research. This project will create tools that assist in research analysis and synthesis, and which can, by design, respond to the high levels of data flux within the discipline. To accomplish one requires (1) support of heterogeneous, network-based, distributed computing environments, (2) the ability to track changes at different servers without having to manually issue one time queries on a repeated basis, and (3) empowerment of biodiversity researchers to build automated retrieval and analysis functions through a network interface without any specific knowledge of programming tasks. From a Computer Science perspective, the problem is to provide a facility for biodiversity scientists which makes possible meaningful analyses over a network of heterogeneous, constantly-updated data sources. This is termed the Biodiversity Community Analysis (BCA) problem. The BCA problem differs from the general Universal Access problem in two ways. First, the user community is restricted to biodiversity researchers. Second, the level of access required goes beyond simply accessing data; in addition, users must be able to construct meaningful biodiversity analyses using such data, and without becoming trained programmers. An Internet-based system specifically for facilitating the development of biodiversity analyses using information obtained from databases on the Internet will be developed. The main distinction between this system and existing Internet facilities to retrieve information and assimilate it into computations is that this approach will provide the necessary facilities to develop and maintain dynamic links such that computations and reports automatically maintain themselves. A further distinction is that the system proposed is specifically designed for users of spreadsheet-level ability, rather than professional programmers. The investigators include leaders from the Biodiversity community, including the project managers for the Specify collections management project and the joint KU-SDSC KDI project in earth system sciences, and from the user interface and public programming language community. The proposed system builds directly on years of prior work. It is made feasible by systems already in place as a result of this prior work and builds on our collateral development activities. The ability to easily formulate temporal ad hoc analyses of biological collections data distributed across national and international networks will leverage 300 years of biological earth inventory by engaging species information in a national analytical and computational infrastructure.