Monday, September 22, 2014

Data, Tools, & Views

After a busy summer of development, we have online a new web application dedicated to Botanica Caroliniana’s data. This is a customized implementation of CITE/CTS Services, which we have developed in collaboration with the Homer Multitext.

With this in place, we are looking forward to more rapidly putting into place interesting and useful views of the growing body of data. For example, this page is a view of the specimens of Mark Catesby (and images of them) organized by (modern) Family and Genus. We are working to index the specimens of the other 18th century collectors so they will appear in this list as well.

All images remain downloadable directly from the project’s data archive. Data collections, XML texts, and indices are always freely available from the project’s GitHub site.

The CITE architecture provides many different ways of discovering, accessing, reproducing, and using the images, texts, and other data available on this site. We will follow up, on this blog, with more specific tutorials for accessing this data through the CITE/CTS service over the coming weeks.