1. SpeciesBank Dreams and Realities Rainer Froese IfM-GEOMAR rfroese@ifm-geomar.de March 2005

2. The SpeciesBank Dream „... a computer interface to the Internet able to find, combine and present data in a way that would be meaningful and useful to the person who issued a query about a species.“

3. Reality Check: Background Two-third of all major software projects fail (IHT 25.1.05)

4. SpeciesBanks, what are they not? Regional or global checklists Purely distributed systems Google: mix of good and garbage Three year projects Amateur products Specialist products Committee products Community products

5. Reality Check: Users Taxonomists? ‚Decision makers‘? Stakeholders? Nobody? Depends on usefulness: Mostly interested public & students Few specialists

9. Reality Check: User Needs Politically very important Boring at best (motherhood statements) Typically misleading –Most users don‘t know what they need Scientific approach: analyze actual usage of what is available

15. About 10,000 visitors per month

16. What Determines Usage Quality and accuracy? Recognition of scientists behind database? MoUs? Beautiful interface, fancy tools? Content: common names, photos, summaries Simplicity of interface (e.g. Google) Number of clicks needed; response time

18. What Determines Usefulness? Actual use What is not used is useless How about yourself (the custodian)?

19. Number of strategies used by phylogenetic Classes plotted over number of recent species in the Class, with linear regression line forced through the origin; slope = 0.37; r2 = 0.9754.

20. Orders per Class plotted over Species per Class. Sarcopterygii, Elasmobranchi and Actinopterygii fall nearly on a hypothetical straight line through the origin; slope = 0.37.

21. Orders per Class plotted over species per Class for four Kingdoms and 415,000 species; the dotted line indicates the maximum number of Orders per species in a Class; slope = 0.37.

22. What is the Best Quality Assurance ? Scientific degree of encoders? Double-encoding? Hierarchy of checking? Usage by custodians! Usage by others!

23. Speed of Data Flow What determines speed of data flow? Bandwidth? Trust!

24. How to Prioritize Data Entry What approach is best when prioritizing data entry? User need analysis? Importance and quality of data? Opportunism! Enter what is ready for entry.

25. Enemies Who are your most dangerous enemies? Critiques? Jealous colleagues? Unconvinced donors? Institutions!

26. Data Encoders Who are the best data encoders? Students? Long-time staff? Experts? Women!

27. Members of the FishBase Team in 1998

28. Back to Dreaming Building the AllFish Species Portal 1.Form Consortium of respective SpeciesBank Custodians and Institutions 2.Agree on Concept, Standards and Protocols 3.Use FishBase Interface and Servers 4.Have small AllFish Encoder and Programmer team 5.Find modest funding from different donors 6.Have AllFish up-and-running within one year

29. Don’t Dream It Be It