Katydid CD ROM

[James Beach]

Hello All --

First, congratulations and laurels to Piotr, Dan and Chris for their
immense investment in database development and distribution of their
species information.  ETI is also doing a stupendous job, though it looks
like their cost-recovery schedule is a bit steeper in that they charge more
for their CD-ROMS.  NSF (and agency other) subsidies help US efforts.  I
was working at the NSF and was the person who supplemented the Otte award
beyond the original request, in the amount of about $50,000 (if I recall
the amount correctly) to encourage the PIs to further develop their on-line
resources.  They did that and as pointed out the OSF is a high-quality,
maintained and freely available resource.

It seems like we have debated distribution media, specifically net versus
CD-ROM, in the past in various ways. Let's all agree that both have their
advantages as distribution media, and one may be more effective than the
other depending on the situation (mostly revolving around the bandwidth to
the target user).  No big deal if you consider just the distribution aspects.

But what is a big deal is the opportunities provided by networked databases
including the possibilities for online, real time integration of species
and specimen information not only within systematics but also among
different disciplines.  Network bandwidth in the developed countries is
still on a steep incline and the broader earth systems science community,
(to include all of ecology, remote sensing, etc.) are developing
architectures to do real-time integration, visualization, analysis and
predictive modeling of species and specimen information.

The systematics community still lacks adequate standards, software
infrastructure and technologists to move rapidly in this area, but I would
urge that the absence of such integration and compatibility standards
should not lower our sights to shoot for independent, technologically
isolated database systems as our ultimate target.   The potential payoffs
for systematics research and for society are orders of magnitude greater
for distributed database systems which interoperate (even through
relatively simple, standard query interfaces) than they are for stand-alone
information resources.  That is very clear if one looks at what is
happening with database systems in the molecular and structural biology
communities and also with what the secondary publishing industry (BIOSIS,
ISI, High Wire, Elsevier, and other science publishers, abstracters and
indexers) is doing to integrate different *kinds* of publication data from
different sources into a common product.  The unstoppable trend is data
integration across levels of biological organization, publication, and
human activity (research and environmental management, teaching, etc.).

It's going to be a very exciting future for systematics and for collections
based research if we can build the standards infrastructure and devote more
of our precious technologists to the task of bringing species and specimen
data, information and knowledge in interoperating systems on the Internet.


Jim B.







At 7/13/1999 08:51 PM -0400, you wrote:
>A few more comments and a clarification concerning our CD ROM.
>
>Margaret K. Thayer wrote:
>
>>Producing and selling it as a book would be astronomically more expensive,
>>as you know, and not electronically searchable, either.
>This is absolutely true, a book, even with a fraction of the
>illustrations included on the CD would be prohibitively expensive, not to
>mention that no sane publisher would agree to publish such a monster.
>
>>Unless there's
>>been a change, the info is also available free on the web (but requires a
>>connection to use it).
>No change there, the Orthoptera Species File Online is still available
>for free (and always will be). Actually, there are some major
>improvements and additions on the horizon. Recently we also added a
>database of recent (and not so recent) publications on Orthoptera,
>accessible from the Orthopterists' Society web site.
>
>>From Piotr's response, it sounds as if it was not
>>subsidized by, say, USDA or other institutions or agencies.
>A major clarification here - creation of this CD in its current format
>was made possible largely by support from the National Science Foundation
>(as a part of a grant to Dan Otte and Piotr Naskrecki to study phylogeny
>of Tettigonioidea). However, we started this project long before we had
>any support and our personal investment had been substantial. Practically
>all images taken before July 1997 (nearly 50% of all images) and most of
>the taxonomic portion of the catalog had been assembled before we
>received the grant.
>
>Cheers,
>Piotr Naskrecki
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Piotr Naskrecki
>Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
>University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269, USA
>
>e-mail: pin93001 at uconnvm.uconn.edu
>
>An Illustrated Catalog of Orthoptera (http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/cd) -
>a database of the Orthoptera of the World on a CD ROM
>
>Orthoptera Species File Online (http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/Orthoptera)
>- a database of the Orthoptera of the World Online
>
>Katydids of La Selva Biological Station Costa Rica
>(http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/interkey/titlepg)
>
>Taxonomy and Collection Manager software
>(http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/interkey/database.html)


____________________________________________________

James H. Beach
Specify Software Project
www.usobi.org/specify
Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center
Dyche Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045
E-mail: jbeach at ukans.edu
Tel: (785) 864-4400, Fax: (785) 864-5010