View the presentation slides  (2.2 Mb)

Abstract

Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH) has been a pioneering effort to provide online access to a federation of plant specimen databases from the major Australian herbaria in each state and territory. The AVH provides a simple interface for accessing millions of detailed plant specimen records.

We have recently designed and implemented a new version of the AVH using a new architecture based on a central index database and using a standard interface to harvest records from each herbarium database based on standard XML-based data exchange protocols (BioCASE and TAPIR) and data schema (ABCD). We have also added additional functionality to the AVH web portal, including a much richer query interface and improved mapping capability.

This presentation will provide an overview of the AVH architecture and implementation and our experiences in developing a national federated data access system for a specific user community, including addressing the problems of data access, quality and consistency.

About the speakers

Paul Coddington programmed some of the earliest parallel computers while working on his PhD in computational physics at the University of Southampton in the mid- 1980s. He subsequently worked on a variety of projects in computational science and applications of high-performance computing and the Web at Caltech and Syracuse University. In 1997 he moved to the University of Adelaide, where he is a Senior Lecturer and leads the Distributed and High-Performance Computing research group, with interests in parallel and distributed computing and applications, and scientific data repositories. He is currently Interim Director of eResearch SA, and was Deputy Director of its predecessor, the South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing. He is also Projects Manager for the Australian Research Collaboration Service.

Shunde Zhang is a member of staff at the South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing where he works on various data projects and is a member of the ARCS data services team. He is also working towards a PhD degree in Data Grid at University of Adelaide’s Department of Computer Science.