Abstract
To solve today’s ecological problems, scientists need well documented, validated, and coherent data archives. Historically, however, ecologists have collected and stored data idiosyncratically, making data integration even among close collaborators difficult. Further, effective ecology data warehouses and subsequent data mining require that individual databases be accurately described with metadata against which the data themselves have been validated. Using database technology would make documenting data sets for archiving, integration, and data mining easier, but few ecologists have expertise to use database technology and they cannot afford to hire programmers. In this paper, we identify the benefits that would accrue from ecologists’ use of modern information technology and the obstacles that prevent that use. We describe our prototype, the Canopy DataBank, through which we aim to enable individual ecologists in the forest canopy research community to be their own database programmers. The key feature that makes this possible is domain-specific database components, which we call templates. We also show how additional tools that reuse these components, such as for visualization, could provide gains in productivity and motivate the use of new technology. Finally, we suggest ways in which communities might share database components and how components might be used to foster easier data integration to solve new ecological problems.
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URL’s referenced in the paper
[canopydb] At http://canopy.evergreen.edu, you will find general information about our project, including links to our software prototypes, DataBank, CanopyView and the BCD.
[lterSyn] http://intranet.lternet.edu/archives/documents/foundations/WhitePaperJune2002GRS.html. LTER 2000–2010: A DECADE OF SYNTHESIS, June 2002.
Other sites about ecosystem informatics or software cited in this paper follow
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics Workshops (sponsored by NSF, USGS and NASA) and http://canopy.evergreen.edu/bdeipi
Ecoinformatics: http://www.ecoinformatics.org and http://ecoinformatics.org/tools.html
Ecological Markup Language (EML) http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/eml/
Ecological Society of America (ESA) archives: http://data.esa.org/
Knowledge Network for BioComplexity (KNB) http://knb.ecoinformatics.org
Long Term Ecological Network (LTER): http://lternet.edu and the H.J. Andrews LTER Data Repository: http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lter
Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK): http://seek.ecoinformatics.org
Protégé and Ontology Management Systems: http://protege.stanford.edu and http://protege.stanford.edu/publications/ontology_development/ontology101-noy-mcguinness.html
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Cushing, J.B., Nadkarni, N., Finch, M. et al. Component-based end-user database design for ecologists. J Intell Inf Syst 29, 7–24 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-006-0028-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-006-0028-6