Towards a global biological information infrastructure

The German Ministry of Science and Education has launched the EDIS-project (Entomological Data and Information System) to digitise and harmonise the rich, but scattered entomological collections housed at various German institutions. The concept is illustrated for the DORSA-subproject, which will integrate German Orthoptera collections within one ‘Virtual Museum’, accessible by an internet-based user interface. DORSA is a network project, connecting expertise in data-basing, collection management, systematics, geographical information systems and neuroinformatics. The core of DORSA is a specimenbased database of important grasshoppers and crickets in German collections. The taxonomic backbone will be the ‘Orthoptera Species File’, a global species register already available on the World Wide Web. DORSA integrates specimen-based pictures and sound recordings. The species-specific songs will be used as a knowledge base for the development of song recognition algorithms and bio-acoustic ‘Rapid assessment tools’. In addition, all localities will be geo-referenced, resulting in a huge data-set of point data, which can be intersected with other GIS-maps (e.g. on rainforest distribution). A customised Java-tool allows geographic depiction and retrieval of taxonomic data.

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