eMonocot Portal

Editor's Notes

• #2: The purpose of this presentation is to introduce the eMonocot portal and its features, explain the rational behind its design, and explain its place within the eMonocot project
• #3: These are the objectives of the portal as a whole
• #4: eMonocot is a project built around existing web-based taxonomic products. Experience has shown that taxonomic communities tend to form communities which have a restricted taxonomic scope and it is our expectation that this will continue
• #5: The eMonocot portal is not like these existing systems because it is a read only system which draws together information from the taxonomic source systems
• #6: The role of the Portal
• #7: We’ve been designing the overall architecture of the solution since the beginning of May. In July we developed web services which expose data held in the World Checklist to the eMonocot systems, including the Scratchpads. In August we worked on the client-side code which uses these web services to harvest data and put it in the portal. We also started to design the eMonocot Portal.So far we have produced a set of mock web-pages which can be found at http://build.e-monocot.org/mocks
• #8: At the beginning of the month we started work on a prototype of the eMonocot portal. We will deploy a version for User-Acceptance-Testing at http://test.e-monocot.orgYou’ll notice that neither the mocks, nor the prototype have much in the way of graphic design or much detail. The intention is to get the functionality and content right and improve the graphical design once the application is more mature, in perhaps 6 months
• #9: eMonocot aims to satisfy a broad spectrum of usersWe split these user groups into four “Segments”Professional and volunteer taxonomic expertsAcademic ecologists, evolutionary biologists and researchersField ecologists conservation biologists and environmental consultantsThe general public, school children and students
• #10: The existing “source” systems are aimed primarily at segment 1Sites like Wikipedia, Wikispecies, Encyclopedia of Life etc are aimed at segment 4 (eMonocot source systems can provide data to EoL)Segments 2 and 3 are a specialized and relatively technical audience, but have requirements which are not met by more general sites. Equally, they are time constrained, and are not able to take advantage of fragmented information, even if it is available via the web.
• #12: This is a mock taxon page – Taxonomic name, authority and protologueImagesTextDistribution mapsTaxonomic or phylogenetic relationshipsInformation about the taxon including links
• #13: The eMonocot portal will deliver identification keys (which may also be available via the source systems).In addition we would like to include a glossary of terms to enable users to understand the specialized terms often found in taxonomic descriptions.There may be other ways to help users identify species apart from the keys, such as image galleries.
• #14: One of the main purposes of the portal is powerful search and browse across all content provided by the source systems.Search using free text queriesRestrict by type of content, taxonomy, geography, or sourceSpecific content types will have particular facets e.g. rank, status, authority, publication date
• #15: Restricting the results using one of the facets on the left will allow you to search within that category. Combine facets to create complex searches e.g. Taxa from Asia in the Orchidaceae of species rank beginning with G
• #16: The content in the portal is derived from the source systems. The eMonocot portal will provide information about where the content has come from and about the source systems so that users can understand how each system has contributed and what its role is.
• #17: For system owners, we hope to be able to provide you with information about the content your system has provided, its quality and volume, the visitors to eMonocot which have looked at your content, and how people find your content.
• #18: In addition to providing access to content provide by the source systems, we would like to support ad-hoc analysis and visualization of the content in eMonocot. As an example, we will be able to provide species numbers by family, genus, region etc and will allow users to query and drill into this information in a flexible way to answer particular questions. For example: how are species in different moncot families distributed across continents? particular monocot family distributed Different types of data to be analysedResults presented in the main page with visualization and tabular data which you can drill into
• #19: An important feature of the portal is to allow registered users to provide feedback to the source systems and to contribute images and data directly using the portal. The portal will pass this information to the source systems behind-the-scenes or notify the maintainers of the source systems (or both)