In Europe, the Provider Software of the Biological Collection Access Service (BioCASe;
http://biocase.org/) is a widely used XML wrapper software for exposing biodiversity data to the Web. Its interface allows for connecting different database management systems in order to map collection data to various XML schemas, like the Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) schema and its extensions. Data can be harvested by data portals in the preferred data standard format by communicating with BioCASe’s Web Service over the BioCASe Protocol.
Data providers, data network coordinators and data aggregators occasionally have to deal with a large number of BioCASe data sources and need to keep track of the data sources’ most important metadata, or the compliance of the respective mappings to external conventions. For this reason, the BioCASe Monitor Service (BMS) was developed as a complementary monitoring tool in 2012. It has been called into action in different German and European projects in order to provide a general overview of the project’s data sources, to facilitate their maintenance and improve their mappings. These projects are for example the German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio;
http://www.gfbio.org), Opening Up the Natural History Heritage for Europeana (OpenUp! project;
http://open-up.eu), Geosciences Collection Access Service (GeoCASe;
http://geocase.eu) and the German GBIF node (GBIF-D,
http://www.gbif.de).
In particular, the interface of the BMS 'Mapping Checker' is very useful for checking plausibility and compliance of a data source when strict quality guidelines of a data portal need to be met: the BMS checks the mapping against the desired target schema and visualizes potential issues. Thus, data network coordinators and aggregators are supported comprehensively and save time during the process of quality control. Now, the BMS can be configured in an even simpler and more flexible way using the recently developed new user interface and backend. The BMS is freely available under GPL 3.0 license*.
In our presentation we will give an overview of the assets of the BioCASe Monitor Service, its new features (e.g. automatically generated landing pages for datasets and a Web Service Application Program Interface (API) for automation) and will demonstrate some use cases. We will provide an outlook for the next steps of rolling out the tool to the international community. An additional demonstration session will present the basic hands-on and will be open for discussing new use cases and implementations.
*
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
