Arctos: A Community and a Collection Management Information System

This post was written by the Arctos and VertNet project teams.

When the VertNet team was preparing the proposal for submission to the National Science Foundation, we spent a lot of time discussing the question “What is VertNet?” After much thought and reflection, we all concluded that VertNet has two meanings: that of a community of data providers and users, and that of a data network. Both of those are equally important. In this way, VertNet and Arctos are very similar.

Arctos as a community: Arctos is a collaboration among natural history museums that includes 46 collections at 8 institutions (ca. 3M records total). Approximately half of those records are in a shared instance used by 7 institutions and 39 collections. The remaining specimens and collections are in a single instance at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Arctos users form a strong community that contributes to data standards, application enhancements, and improved data quality through sharing of authorities for taxonomy, geography, people names, part types, and other data.

Arctos as a collection management information system: Arctos is a comprehensive collection management information system that integrates access to diverse types of vertebrate and non-vertebrate collections and data types (e.g., specimens, observations, tissues, parasites, stomach contents, documents such as fieldnotes, and media such as images, audio recordings, and video). In addition to rigorously displaying all that is known about a museum record, Arctos provides solutions to managing and integrating collections data with object tracking (via barcodes or RFID), transactions (loans, borrows, accessions, permits), geospatial information (coordinates and descriptive data), agents (people and organizations), and usage (publications, projects, and citations). Data are accessible to the public through Arctos’ strong web presence, and are continuously updated and available via a DiGIR provider to the taxon-based networks and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Arctos is deeply integrated with external internet resources. GEOLocate provides embedded, graphical one-click georeferencing for specimens and localities. Georeferenced localities are displayed on maps using BerkeleyMapper, Google Earth, or Google Maps. GenBank provides reciprocal linkages to specimens with sequence data. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) provides media hosting and processing, including automated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing of images with text such as herbarium sheets.

Arctos and VertNet: Arctos has been a major contributor of particularly rich, high-quality vertebrate data to MaNIS, HerpNET, ORNIS, and FishNet2. The integrated linkages between specimen or observational records, geospatial information, genetic data, and media provide both opportunities and challenges for VertNet. Arctos will take advantage of the new publishing capabilities of VertNet by communicating through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which will allow updates to be published as news feeds when they occur during data management. Applications subscribing to these news feeds will be notified of Arctos changes in real time. Conversely, Arctos will subscribe to and store data annotations generated by VertNet users, thus further enriching  the original record. All of the institutions collaborating in Arctos will benefit at once from these added capabilities to the shared system. From the VertNet perspective, one of the development challenges will be how best to propagate integrated linkages such as in Arctos to the broader network of providers via the API and portal. This is something that we plan to address in the coming year.

In the future, we may start to think of Arctos and VertNet in a third way…as a fully integrated biodiversity repository accessible from intuitive portals where multidisciplinary questions can be addressed. One can imagine quickly accessing all the ecological observations that early century biologists made while they surveyed the Alaskan frontiers. Or ask, what did the morning chorus of birds sound like in a Guatemalan rain forest? And how has it changed? How often did spouses accompany field expeditions and what were their roles? How have genotypes and phenotypes shifted in murids? Where is most of the genetic variation in the Salamandridae? We can’t anticipate all the uses for the new Arctos-VertNet but can be confident of a rich potential.