The BiodiversityResearchEnvironment Virtual Research Environment

Description

The BiodiversityResearchEnvironent Virtual Research EnvironmentA ''system'' with the following distinguishing features: ''(i)'' it is a Web-based working environment; ''(ii)'' it is tailored to serve the needs of a Community of Practice; ''(iii)'' it is expected to provide a community of practice with the whole array of commodities needed to accomplish the community’s goal(s); ''(iv)'' it is open and flexible with respect to the overall service offering and lifetime; and ''(v)'' it promotes fine-grained controlled sharing of both intermediate and final research results by guaranteeing ownership, provenance, and attribution. is conceived to provide biodiversity scientist with facilities for seamless access to a rich array of biodiversity data including occurrence points and taxa records from established providers including GBIF, Catalogue of Life, and OBIS.

URI: https://portal.i-marine.d4science.org/group/biodiversityresearchenvironment

Functionality

The main facilities this VREVirtual Research Environment. offers are:

• Species Products Discovery: to enable users to discover and manage species products (occurrence data and taxa names) from a number of heterogeneous providers in a seamless way. Once discovered, objects can be stored in the workspace for future uses;

• Reporting facilities: to enable users to collaboratively produce reports consisting in complex documents characterised by well defined structures (templates). Via this facility, users can define new templates as well as collaboratively create new reports compliant with defined templates. Reports might contain diverse elements ranging from texts to images and tables, and such constituents can result from objects stored in the user workspace. Reports can be materialised in multiple formats including PDF, HTML and OpenXML;

• Workspace: to enable every user to store and organise the information objects he/she is interested to work with. In addition to that, the user is allowed to collaborate with other users by sharing objects and messages;

• VREVirtual Research Environment. Management: to enable authorised users (i.e. VREVirtual Research Environment. Managers) to manage other users using or willing to access the VREVirtual Research Environment.. VREVirtual Research Environment. Managers can (i) authorise users in accessing the VREVirtual Research Environment., (ii) assign or withdraw roles to users, (iii) remove users, and (iv) send a communication to the current users.

Data

The main datasets that are available via the services hosted by this VREVirtual Research Environment. include:

• Catalogue of Life – offering information on known species of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms, namely taxonomic information;
• GBIF – offering information on species, namely occurrence data;
• OBIS – offering information on marine species from all of the worlds oceans, both occurrence and taxonomic information;
• SpeciesLink – offering information on species, namely occurrence data;
• WoRMS – offering information on marine species, namely taxonomic information;

Software

• (DONE) gCube 2.9.1 (August '12);
• (DONE) gCube 2.11.0 (October '12);
• (DONE) gCube 2.12.0 (February '13);
• (DONE) gCube 2.13.0 (March '13);
• (DONE) gCube 2.14.0 (May '13);
• (DONE) gCube 2.15.0 (June '13);
• (DONE) gCube 2.16.0 (July '13);
• (DONE) gCube 2.17.0 (December '13);
• (DONE) gCube 2.17.1 (December '13);
• (DONE) gCube 3.0.0 (March '14);