Technical documentation of collection management systems at the GFBio Collection Data Centers

Technical documentation of collection management systems at the GFBio Collection Data Centers, Status 2014
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 platform and federal infrastructure - they should 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.

In this context, knowledge on the existing database structures, particularily concerning the collection management systems being housed at the respective GFBio collection archives is of highest priority. To be able to fulfill all GFBio requirements, systems need to be technically extended and adopted by developer groups in Germany, for instance, by establishing more and most different interfaces for the dynamic import and export, transfer and provision of data. Only in this way, data- and workflows can be professionalised in the GFBio context.

The collection management systems documented below have to develop data exchange mechanisms for internal communication as well as for archiving and publishing data in the GFBio context. New architectures of workflows with regard to the common management of metadata and multimedia data, analysis data from experiments, data streams, methods applied and the linkage of identifier systems are needed for delivering well-structured open data for GFBio and the national (and international) research community.

Further Wiki pages with technical documentations will follow, e. g., including information on the multimedia data repositories and archiving systems in use by the GFBio collection data centers/ archives.

General Information

Software and Database System

Interfaces to export data in various schemas and standards