EDIT

The DataPortal documentation needs to be improved.

Currently different texts on the DataPortal are spread over multiple pages and websites:

General¶

• CDM DataPortal in the Wiki: https://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/redmine/projects/edit/wiki/CDM_DataPortal

• Cdm Dataportal ImplementationNotes: https://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/redmine/projects/edit/wiki/CdmDataportalImplementationNotes

• CDM DataPortal - Druapl Project: http://drupal.org/project/cdm_dataportal

FAQ¶

all faq need to be moved to the new maven product site at http://cybertaxonomy.eu/portal/

• CDM DataPortal User FAQ: https://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CDMDataPortalUserFaq

• CDM DataPortal Admin FAQ: -- does not exist jet ---

Installation¶

_All texts on general installation procedures will be located in future only in the CDM Bundle Site

• CDM DataPortal Install Guide in this wiki: https://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/CDMDataPortalInstall

• CDM DataPortal Install Guide in the CDM Bundle Site

A selection of texts on the DataPortal from former publications¶

EDIT Data Portal

The EDIT Data Portal publishes data hosted in a CDM Community Store online.

Each taxon is represented by an individual page, which displays the list of synonyms, related taxa, occurrences, descriptions, media, and more. The list of homotypic and heterotypic synonyms is ordered historically and grouped by types.

It has been implemented as a module for the content management system Drupal. Thus the EDIT Data Portal offers a great deal of flexibility making it possible to adapt the EDIT Data Portal to the individual needs of a community.

Drupal as multipurpose tool and application framework for biodiversity information networks

The open source content management system Drupal becomes more and more widely used in the area of biodiversity informatics. This year, for example, the members of the EDIT project assigned a memorandum of understanding to use this software, where ever possible.

This popularity is not only due to its capabilities to just manage content for websites. The genius of what the Drupal community has done, is to reduce all of the aspects of social software to the core and then build a platform that could be infinitely extended to allow the assembly of almost any styles of online social interaction. During the past years the community contributed over 3000 different modules extending the Drupal core and thus on one hand providing a highly flexible construction kit and on the other hand showing by many examples that nearly everything is possible, perhaps only limited by the human imagination.

Constructing the ‘EDIT platform for cybertaxonomy’ Drupal is used to build up general web applications like forums, blogs, a central repository for users and taxonomists, the ‘Experts Database’ and a software tracker and rating system. Last but not least also taxonomy related software like the ‘Scratchpads’ and the ‘CDM DataPortal’ is based on this system.

The ‘CDM DataPortal’ is using Drupal as an application framework to publish taxonomic treatments to a closed community or to the public. The treatments, stored in database are, accessible via web services to which the ‘CDM DataPortal’ connects to fetch the information to be displayed. Furthermore does the ‘CDM DataPortal’ act as an easy to use web service allowing reusing fragments of its pages in other contexts already rendered as HTML.

The new TDWG standards architecture relies among others on semantic web technologies, which are tailored around a data format called RDF. Unfortunately there has always been a lack of common tools for easy processing and visualising data provided by the RDF based ontology.

Since the last big version switch to Drupal 6, some very interesting modules are being simmered, which will allow storing, aggregating and processing RDF data, making Drupal an highly interesting candidate for building applications which benefit from the new semantic capabilities of the TDWG standards architecture. Drupal is promising not only because of the interesting technical implementations but also because of its popularity and support from a vast community.

Some RDF related modules are already available although most of them still are in alpha status. One of these incorporates RDF taxonomies into Drupal, another one is actually an ensemble of modules providing comprehensive RDF functionality and interoperability.

With ‘Exhibit’ and ‘Potluck’ the SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) project of the MIT has developed interesting tools for visualizing, browsing and mixing data. Exhibit for example displays structured data in the form of rich visualizations that can be searched, filtered and sorted using faceted browsing. The Exhibit module will bring these abilities to Drupal.

Tools for efficiently using the TDWQG RDF ontology are in reach and await their evaluation. So the time has come to find out what is possible to vision the next generation biodiversity network tools.