Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
PDF
Conference Abstract
Self-publishing Biodiversity Data Products on the Web
expand article infoMatthew Yoder‡, José Luis Pereira§, Hernán Pereira|, Dmitry A Dmitriev‡, Ralph Edward DeWalt‡, Maria-Marta Cigliano|, Deborah L Paul‡, James R Flood‡
‡ University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Champaign, United States of America
§ División Entomología, Museo de La Plata, UNLP, La Plata, Argentina
| División Entomología, Museo de La Plata, UNLP, CEPAVE - CONICET, La Plata, Argentina
Corresponding author: Matthew Yoder (diapriid@gmail.com)
Received: 25 Aug 2022 | Published: 07 Sep 2022
© 2022 Matthew Yoder, José Luis Pereira, Hernán Pereira, Dmitry Dmitriev, Ralph DeWalt, Maria-Marta Cigliano, Deborah L Paul, James Flood
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: Yoder M, Pereira JL, Pereira H, Dmitriev DA, DeWalt RE, Cigliano M-M, Paul DL, Flood JR (2022) Self-publishing Biodiversity Data Products on the Web. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e94061. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.94061
 Open Access

Abstract

Biodiversity informatics workbenches and aggregators that make their data externally accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs) facilitate the development of customized applications that fit the needs of a diverse range of communities. In the past, the technical skills required to host web-facing applications placed constraints on many researchers: they either needed to find technical help, or expand their own skills. These limits are now significantly reduced when free or low-cost web-site hosting is combined with small, well-documented applications that require minimal configuration to setup. We illustrate two applications that take advantage of this approach: an interactive key engine (presently named "distinguish") and TaxonPages, a taxon page service application. Both applications make use of TaxonWorks' API. We discuss the limits, e.g., the user must be online to access the data behind the application, and advantages of this approach, e.g., the application server can be served locally, on the users' own computer, and the underlying data are all accessible in more technical formats.

Keywords

API, application, taxon pages, keys, interactive keys

Presenting author

Matthew Yoder

Presented at

TDWG 2022

login to comment