Should we use Fedora? Mike Haft & Kearon McNicol 20/01/2009

What is the FBA? Renowned scientific association Establish 1929 Support science and interest community Works closely with academics and government agency Our mission is “to advance freshwater science and encourage as many people as possible to adopt it as the best way to understand, protect and manage our precious water resources”.

About the FBA’s info resources The FBA has a variety of information resources built up over its 80 year history, these include : – The FBA Library, the world’s most comprehensive freshwater library – The FBA unpublished collection, a wealth of archived scientific material ranging from notebooks to specimen samples – Large historical datasets collected over many years that of importance to long-term studies (i.e. climate change) – An image archive – Online resources in the current FreshwaterLife portal

Current systems Library catalogue – CDS ISIS Unpublished collection catalogue – Access database Data – spreadsheets, notebooks, etc. Images – Gallery and boxes FreshwaterLife portal ‘repository’ – UN Food and Agriculture Organisation software And more… Experience in terminologies, thesauri, ontologies, etc.

What is FreshwaterLife? A collaboration between specialists, enthusiasts and organisations with a freshwater interest Purpose: To promote easy access to the world’s information on freshwater organisms and their habitats Aims: 1.To support the information needs of those with an interest in freshwater biology. 2.To encourage communication and information sharing throughout the freshwater interest community. 3.To promote an appreciation and understanding of freshwater ecosystems.

What is FreshwaterLife? It is built on the input of partners and individual experts around the world – 40+ editors – 900+ registered users FwL has been going since 2000 and has been run thus far on software provided by the FAO. We want to change this.

New development of the FwL Portal Use of the Liferay Portal software enables: – Individual components such as species life history; images; data – User can create pages according to their own needs by adding components as they wish – Ability to have default views and views tailored to specific user groups and organizations.

Using the new portal The JSR 286 standard and various technologies (i.e. JSF & ICEfaces) allow inter portlet communication in the Liferay portal This means that if navigating through a species taxonomy, the navigation portlet can pass info on what species is being browsed to other portlets which can fetch and display the relevant information, i.e. : – images portlet – life-history portlet – library catalogue portlet

Using the new portal The individual portlets will have to know where to look for the relevant information and: How to display it (i.e. what format). The information sources they will need are widely dispersed in various FBA catalogues and databases in a variety of formats (i.e. MySQL, MS Access, Endnote etc) The portal will have to be able to edit not just read information sources (subject to appropriate permissions)

Is Fedora a solution? How would we achieve this using Fedora? Can we use our existing biology domain ontologies to categorize and retrieve objects/information from Fedora? Are automated updates and maintenance of imported information possible? Is seamless workflow controlled editing of Fedora objects possible from the portal?