Core product of BioCASe is the BioCASe Provider Software (BPS), a data binding middleware that allows publishing biodiversity data as a BioCASe-compliant web service. BioCASe web services can be queried and harvested with the BioCASe protocol and will return ABCD-structured documents. The Access to Biological Collections Data (ABCD) schema is a standard that allows storing rich information from both observation and collection databases, both living and preserved, and is suitable for botanical, zoological, bacterial and viral data. The BioCASe Provider Software is Open Source, platform-independent and can connect to most contemporary database management systems.
Grouped around the BioCASe Provider Software, additional tools and products have been developed:
Portal software is used to create interfaces which can be used to perform queries on the network and retrieve data from different data providers. Currently there are several portals accessing BioCASe data providers around the world, most of them using the
BioCASe data portal, a software package that can be used for setting up special interest biodiversity data networks. The
Simple User Interface is a demonstrator running a live query on the connected data providers, collecting and displaying the result documents.
The Berlin Harvesting and Indexing Toolkit (B-HIT) is a harvesting tool based on GBIF's former harvesting software. It can be used to crawl BioCASe, DiGIR and DarwinCore-Archive providers in a biodiversity network and will create local cache database of the most commonly used data items. B-HIT supports the rich data that can be provided with the
ABCD data schema, such as multiple identifications, unit associations and comprehensive multimedia metadata. More information can be found in the
B-HIT wiki.
The Thesaurus Optimized Query Expander is a tool that can connect any thesaurus database with the BioCASe data portal (or any other portal or software), thus effectively improving search results for user queries. Once installed and configured, the thesaurus will be accessible as web service and can be queried for taxonomic or geographic synonyms, misapplied names or hierarchies for given terms.
The Data Quality Toolkit was developed by the OpenUp! project and aides collection holders in tackling data quality issues. It will examine the records published by a BioCASe web service and perform a number of data quality checks, for example for the validity of taxonomic names used or whether the gathering location conforms to the coordinates provided.
The BioCASe Monitor is a tool that allows monitoring the status of BioCASe data providers in a network. In addition to the general availability of the web services it can be used to check their configuration and get an overview of the published data.
This tool allows to view data usage statistics for the BioCASe providers feeding data to GBIF. It tracks all BioCASe records downloaded through the GBIF data portal as well as the number of individual DarwinCore archives downloaded that contained BioCASe records.
AnnoSys is a generic annotation system that provides the digital equivalent to traditional annotation slips attached to collection specimens. Users can create annotations on specimens they visit on data portals, which will be displayed to latter users and also be sent to the collection's curator.
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