Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 2, number 4, 2009 // View article

Biodiversity Information Systems Evolution

Authors:
Didier Sébastien
Noël Conruyt
Rémy Courdier
Nicolas Sébastien
Tullio Tanzi

Keywords: Biodiversity Information System, BIS, MABIS, behavior, immersion, metaverse, data evaluation, webservice

Abstract:
The computerization of scientific data treatment and the relatively recent awareness of the fragility of the natural world environment (Rio Conference "Earth Summit" in 1992) have led to the proliferation of Information Systems dedicated to biodiversity. Given the various data that they contain, they are complex applications, focused on the needs of one type of environmental scientist, closed to amateur’s contributions and unable to support ethological information. Moreover, the data contained in these systems are hardly accessible to nonspecialists like the general public or decision-makers. At the same time, new communication protocols, like webservices ensure a better sharing of information between applications; while immersive representations of threedimensional virtual worlds, also known as metaverses, allow a more natural assimilation of information. By putting users in a reality reproduction built from information systems, all entities can be represented in a consistent virtual environment [15]. But sharing and turning Biodiversity Information System’s data in a coherent metaverse is not a trivial process. It relies on an adapted architecture and the availability of specific metadata, as several virtual worlds representing several levels of details can be generated. This paper is a contribution to the enhancement of Biodiversity Information Systems in order to make them more adaptable, usable, and representable for several kinds of users: different types of specialists, amateurs, and the general public. The MABIS modular architecture is presented as an open, efficient and evolutionary model for structuring Biodiversity Information System. The advantages of its architecture allow to ease its development, store ethological data, manage, share and represent complex entities and metadata while ensuring their authentication through an evaluation process.

Pages: 269 to 282

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: March 17, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x