April 2010 newsletter summary

From the Director

Donald Hobern talks about simple ways to share species information. (article no longer available)
The ALA aims to bring together all available information on species found in Australia – and to make it as easy as possible for any researcher or other user to help to complete the picture.
A similar page about sharing »

Matt Taylor, Centre for Biological Information Technology, University of Queensland reports on the IdentifyLife project. (article no longer available)
CBIT is developing a framework for handling descriptive data that will provide a new model for interactive identification, capable of scaling to millions of species.
A similar page about IdentifyLife »
John La Salle, Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO Entomology reports on the launch of a Virtual Taxonomy Laboratory »
Late last year CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Science opened a VTL between the Australian National Insect Collection and the Institute of Zoology in Beijing.

Miles Nicholls, Atlas of Living Australia and Stephanie von Gavel, Legal Counsel, CSIRO report on the Data Integration project. (article no longer available)
A similar page about Creative Commons licensing »
Piers Higgs, Gaia Resources reports on the Citizen Science project. (article no longer available)
Museum Victoria is developing an educational toolkit (Biodiversity Snapshots) for schools that will, amongst other things, allow students to use mobile devices to record the animals they observe.
A similar page about Citizen Science »
Lee Belbin, Blatant Fabrications reports on the Geospatial Data Management project »
Team member Adam Collins has developed two key applications for the Spatial Analysis Toolkit.

ECOS article: Living atlas … coming to a screen near you
Universities, museums, CSIRO and government agencies are working together on a visionary program to link all existing data on Australia’s life-forms into an online ‘encyclopaedia of life’ with single portal access.
The Atlas in the news »