Darwin Core Engine

#tdwg 2011

Darwin Core Engine

The Original Plan

Nah

Surprise!

Darwin Core Standard

"A vocabulary of words that biologists,
hackers, and citizen scientists use to broadly
describe the biodiversity of life on earth."

Use Case: Prepare

Uploading records
Matching record fields to Darwin Core fields
Cleaning it up

Use Case: Administer

User permissions
Building indexes for querying
Replication and synchronization

Use Case: Publish

Make records publically visible on the Internet

Use Case: Access

Query using UI and API
Visualize using maps, charts, tables
Download some or harvest all
Subscribe to data changes

Constraint: Scalability

Constraint: Sustainability

Constraint: Usability

*aaS Approach

*aaS Approach

Hybrid Approach

Hybrid Approach

Balance Constraint Tradeoffs

CouchDB and HTML5

CouchDB

"An open source NoSQL database
that stores JSON documents."

CouchApp

Chris Anderson

Store & serve HTML5 apps using CouchDB
JQuery plugin + CouchDB REST API
Python & Node.js CLI for deployment

HTML5

"A specification that supports
amazing browser capabilities
for building really great apps".

HTML5

"Capabilities include databases, file
system access, offline support,
vector graphics, threading, and more."

Live Demo

(boom)

CouchDB + HTML5

Supports Darwin Core Engine use cases
Balances constraints
Multi-version concurrency control, change notifications, offline support
Extreme data and app portability

Thank You!

We totally stole these slides from Pamela Fox
Which she made using Fathom.js by Mark Dalgleish
Aaron and John avatars created with androidify.com
Darwin Core Engine Funded by NSF
The folks at iriscouch.com for free cloud hosted CouchDB
PIs Carla Cicero, Carol Spencer, Rob Guralnick, Dave Vieglais, Hank Bart
All the TDWG peeps
Dennis Ritchie for C and Unix, Steve Jobs for our Macs