Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Falko Glöckler (falko.gloeckler@mfn.berlin)
Received: 28 Sep 2020 | Published: 06 Oct 2020
© 2020 Falko Glöckler, James Macklin, David Shorthouse, Christian Bölling, Satpal Bilkhu, Christian Gendreau
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Glöckler F, Macklin J, Shorthouse DP, Bölling C, Bilkhu S, Gendreau C (2020) DINA—Development of open source and open services for natural history collections & research. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59070. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59070
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The DINA Consortium (DINA = “DIgital information system for NAtural history data”, https://dina-project.net) is a framework for like-minded practitioners of natural history collections to collaborate on the development of distributed, open source software that empowers and sustains collections management. Target collections include zoology, botany, mycology, geology, paleontology, and living collections. The DINA software will also permit the compilation of biodiversity inventories and will robustly support both observation and molecular data.
The DINA Consortium focuses on an open source software philosophy and on community-driven open development. Contributors share their development resources and expertise for the benefit of all participants. The DINA System is explicitly designed as a loosely coupled set of web-enabled modules. At its core, this modular ecosystem includes strict guidelines for the structure of Web application programming interfaces (APIs), which guarantees the interoperability of all components (https://github.com/DINA-Web). Important to the DINA philosophy is that users (e.g., collection managers, curators) be actively engaged in an agile development process. This ensures that the product is pleasing for everyday use, includes efficient yet flexible workflows, and implements best practices in specimen data capture and management.
There are three options for developing a DINA module:
First option to contribute to DINA developments: New code designed in a DINA compliant manner to allow for interoperability with the DINA system.
Second option to contribute to DINA developments: Existing software can be refactored in a DINA compliant manner to allow for interoperability with the DINA system.
Third option to contribute to DINA developments: Existing software that cannot be modified for several reasons could be wrapped by a DINA compliant API layer to allow for interoperability with the DINA system.
All three of these scenarios have been applied in the modules recently developed: a module for molecular data (SeqDB), modules for multimedia, documents and agents data and a service module for printing labels and reports:
The SeqDB collection management and molecular tracking system (
In the case of the Multimedia and Document Store module and the Agents module, a brand new codebase was established whose technology choices were aligned with the DINA vision. These two modules have been created from fundamental use cases for collection management and digitization workflows and will continue to evolve as more modules come online and broaden their scope.
The DINA Labels & Reporting module is a generic service for transforming data in arbitrary printable layouts based on customizable templates. In order to use the module in combination with data managed in collection management software Specify (http://specifysoftware.org) for printing labels of collection objects, we wrapped the Specify 7 API with a DINA-compliant API layer called the “DINA Specify Broker”. This allows for using the easy-to-use web-based template engine within the DINA Labels & Reports module without changing Specify’s codebase.
In our presentation we will explain the DINA development philosophy and will outline benefits for different stakeholders who directly or indirectly use collections data and related research data in their daily workflows. We will also highlight opportunities for joining the DINA Consortium and how to best engage with members of DINA who share their expertise in natural science, biodiversity informatics and geoinformatics.
collection data management, research data, software development, collaboration, interoperability
Falko Glöckler
TDWG 2020
The DINA system is not intended to be a competitive product to other collection management systems. Instead, the DINA Consortium is pushing forward the approach of Open Source developments in a joint community-driven effort in order to maximize the usability and sustainability of the system beyond the availability of resources of individual institutions or vendors.