Technical documentation of multimedia data management systems

One of the goals of GFBio is to strengthen the data centers at the Natural History Collections and Culture Collections in Germany and improve their infrastructure to manage, archive and publish biodiversity research data on the long run. As a consequence - latest after the realisation of the GFBio portal (www.gfbio.org) and decentralised infrastructure - they will be able (a) to mobilise their own data resources for research purposes and (b) to provide their technical infrastructure for managing, archiving and publishing biodiversity research data including multimedia data.

Multimedia objects and other digital assets in binary format (like PDF documents, MS Excel files and MS PowerPoint presentations) are managed and archived as part of the regular tasks of the collection data centers. Import and export of files, conversion of file formats, as well as searching within, managing and archiving the files (including their versioning) is carried out by the different systems in place. In general, the multimedia software is integrated in the particular in-house system environment and file storage methods to fulfill the requirements of the collection community by enrichment of digital assets with museum and archive relevant meta information. All GFBio collection data center use at least one solution to manage multimedia objects, as shown in the table below. The deployed software spans a wide range from picture editing, image processing and storage solutions (e.g. Canto Cumulus, FSI-System, Thumps) to more complex environments providing a deeper spectrum of functionalities. Some of the systems in place are very flexible to add any kind of structural, descriptive and administrative metadata (rights and technical metadata included). For types of metadata see Anonymous 2004). The descriptive metadata might be domain-specific and hierarchically structured, e. g. in DWB and MorphDBase.

In parallel, the GFBio collection data centers documented their installations of collection management systems and Technical documentation of management systems not specialised on collection data. Additional Wiki pages with Technical Documentations will follow.

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