NBN Technical Seminar – November 2009
On the 19th November the NBN convened a technical conference. The idea behind it was to share news about new developments with the NBN technical community. Unfortunately the conference was arranged at the last minute and as a result the only venue that could be sourced held a maximum of forty people. As a result invitations were selective and targeted at those organisations that were already actively sharing data through the NBN Gateway.
The day focused on three areas:
- The emerging NBN Validator
- The potential of Drupal and Scratchpads (a Drupal implementation) for hosting biodiversity websites across the UK
- The current status of Indicia for on-line data capture
The NBN Validator
The validator was well received and a number of pertinent points were raised in terms of its functionality that will help inform how it develops from beta to release. In addition an initial discussion was held around how the validator could be practically integrated into the various data flows across the network. The key issue is to avoid the same rogue record appearing multiple times across the network and attempting to get to a state where once it was invalidated there was a mechanism to ensure any copies of it could be easily identified (and also invalidated). It was also noted that, given that many of the verification rules would be generated by the schemes there also needed to be good exchange between the local and national (currently is very limited).
Further information on the validator is available. Please note that it is currently (@November 2009) in beta release which means that it is not absolutely robust, though it is a good time to contribute ideas on how it can be improved. Please send your comments to data@nbn.org.uk
Further information and links
Drupal / Scratchpads
Drupal is an emerging open source content management system which essentially makes it possible to establish and maintain a website with multiple users contributing content. There is quite a lot of interest in the system at the moment, particularly across the biodiversity community – for example it has been adopted by the highly publicised Encyclopaedia of Life.
Within the UK the Natural History Museum have led the development of an implementation of Drupal known as Scratchpads. This is particularly aimed at taxonomists but could also potentially be adopted by a national scheme to give an initial web presence with very little cost. In addition Stuart Ball demonstrated how core Drupal can be developed to produce a species portal.
Further information / links:
- Material around setting up and customising Drupal to create a species portal
- Main Drupal site
- Emerging Drupal bioinformatics group groups.drupal.org/bioinformatics
- Google group set up to share ideas and experience on applying Drupal http://groups.google.com/group/scratchpads
- Main Scratchpads site (includes link to apply for a Scratchpads)
- Scratchpads project modules home.scratchpads.eu/
- Scratchpads SVN repository svn.scratchpads.eu/viewvc/scratchpads/
- BMC Bioinformatics paper www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/S14/S6
Indicia
Indicia is a toolkit that simplifies the construction of new websites which allow online recording, mapping and reporting of wildlife records. John Van Breda demonstrated how the system can be implemented with a few lines of PHP. He also indicated that there was increasing interest in developing tight and simple integration within Drupal.
- Go to the Indicia pages on this site for more detail
- Main code repository and documentation code.google.com/p/indicia/
- Indicia discussion on the NBN forum forums.nbn.org.uk/viewforum.php?id=19
Summary
Overall the day was very well received and there is definitely an appetite to have further meetings of this kind. This fits well with the current status of the NBN as it moves from development to roll-out and adoption and therefore much closer and frequent engagement is needed with the general technical community.