Should we use Fedora?

Mike Haft & Kearon McNicol

20/01/2009

What is the FBA?

• Renowned scientific association

• Establish 1929• Support science and

interest community• Works closely with

academics and government agency

Our mission is “to advance freshwater science and

encourage as many people as possible to adopt it as the

best way to understand, protect and manage our

precious water resources”.

About the FBA’s info resources

• The FBA has a variety of information resources built up over its 80 year history, these include :– The FBA Library, the world’s most comprehensive

freshwater library– The FBA unpublished collection, a wealth of

archived scientific material ranging from notebooks to specimen samples

– Large historical datasets collected over many years that of importance to long-term studies (i.e. climate change)

– An image archive– Online resources in the current FreshwaterLife

portal

Current systems

• Library catalogue – CDS ISIS• Unpublished collection catalogue – Access

database• Data – spreadsheets, notebooks, etc.• Images – Gallery and boxes• FreshwaterLife portal ‘repository’ – UN Food and

Agriculture Organisation software• And more…

• Experience in terminologies, thesauri, ontologies, etc.

What is FreshwaterLife?

• A collaboration between specialists, enthusiasts and organisations with a freshwater interest

Purpose: To promote easy access to the world’s information on freshwater organisms and their habitats

• Aims:1. To support the information needs of those with an interest

in freshwater biology.2. To encourage communication and information sharing

throughout the freshwater interest community.3. To promote an appreciation and understanding of

freshwater ecosystems.

What is FreshwaterLife?

• It is built on the input of partners and individual experts around the world– 40+ editors– 900+ registered users

• FwL has been going since 2000 and has been run thus far on software provided by the FAO. We want to change this.

Example Portlet Page Page properties(used to retrieve appropriate content and styling)- Template: Species summary- Style: Pond conservation- User level: Million ponds- Taxon: Triops cancriformis- GeoRegion: UK

Enhanced Catalogue, Search and Retrieval(uses ontologies, dictionaries, etc.)

Species nameTaxonomy, Synonyms, Common names

FwL Names Repository

NHM Species

Dictionary

uBio

Catalogue of Life

FwL Image Archive

Wildscreen ARKive

Images

Hand-written text: Million ponds intro

Hand-written text: UK distribution

Other hand-written texts as selected in the template

Texts extracted from other websites

Encyclopaedia of Life ?

Wikipedia?

FwL Data registry

Predefined queries

FwL Prototype

Alterra / Tachet

Biosys

NPS

ECDIN

Others ...

Fw

L e

nh

ance

d d

ata

inte

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gat

ion

sys

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(use

s on

tolo

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)FwL

Bibliography

FBA librarycatalogue

BritishLibrary

IAMSLICFwL Texts Repository

- Subject: species distribution- Taxon: Triops cancriformis

- Subject: species intro- User: Million ponds- Taxon: Triops cancriformis

FBA-FwL ePrint / eLibrary

Selection of relevant refernces, websites, etc.

Data summaries – e.g. pH range, etc.

Selection of relevant datasets

Could probably use Fedora Commons

Could probably use ComparaGrid

New development of the FwL Portal

• Use of the Liferay Portal software enables:– Individual components such as species life

history; images; data– User can create pages according to their own

needs by adding components as they wish– Ability to have default views and views

tailored to specific user groups and organizations.

Using the new portal

• The JSR 286 standard and various technologies (i.e. JSF & ICEfaces) allow inter portlet communication in the Liferay portal

• This means that if navigating through a species taxonomy, the navigation portlet can pass info on what species is being browsed to other portlets which can fetch and display the relevant information, i.e. :– images portlet – life-history portlet – library catalogue portlet

Using the new portal

• The individual portlets will have to know where to look for the relevant information and:

• How to display it (i.e. what format).• The information sources they will need are

widely dispersed in various FBA catalogues and databases in a variety of formats (i.e. MySQL, MS Access, Endnote etc)

• The portal will have to be able to edit not just read information sources (subject to appropriate permissions)

Is Fedora a solution?

• How would we achieve this using Fedora?• Can we use our existing biology domain

ontologies to categorize and retrieve objects/information from Fedora?

• Are automated updates and maintenance of imported information possible?

• Is seamless workflow controlled editing of Fedora objects possible from the portal?