Data Center

The ZFMK Biodiversity Data Center is constituted by the Biodiversity Informatics section and the IT department at ZFMK. It is therewith part of the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig (ZFMK).

The Biodiversity Data Center is aimed at hosting, archiving, publishing and distributing data from biodiversity research and zoological collections. The Biodiversity Data Center handles and curates data on:

• The specimens of the institutes collection, including provenance, distribution, habitat, and taxonomic data.
• Observations, recordings and measurements from field research, monitoring and ecological inventories.
• Morphological measurements, descriptions on specimens, as well as
• Genetic barcode libraries, and
• Genetic and molecular research data associated with specimens or environmental samples.

For this purpose, suitable software and hardware systems are operated and the required infrastructure is further developed.

Core components of the software architecture are:

• The DiversityWorkbench suite for managing all collection-related information.
• The Digital Asset Management system easyDB for multimedia assets.
• The description database Morph·D·Base for morphological data sets and character matrices.

The data are connected to national and international data networks (e.g. GBIF, GFBio) via the data standards and protocols established in the community.

The Morphological Description and Multimedia Database MorphDBase is developed in the section and housed at ZFMK and is used for storing, archiving and dissemination of scientific multimedia content ( www.morphdbase.de).

Data are published using the ABCD standard and the BioCASe Provider Software (www.biocase.org).

Scientific data curation services (incl. taxonomic services)

The taxonomic expertise and interest is that of the ZFMK.

Special expertise in various groups of terrestrical animalia exists. It is a precondition to successfully serve the GBIF-D Node Vertebrates.

Located at the ZFMK is Morph·D·Base - The Morphological Description Database. Morph·D·Base is a database driven online platform for scientists for sharing their data privately and with the public. It allows the long-term storage of various kinds of media (e.g., images. 3d-stacks of images. movies, etc.). Morph·D·Base functions as an archive and publication plattform for media from various research projects (e.g. the German Barcode of Life Project and the Freshwater Identification for Europe, FREDIE) as well as the collections within the ZFMK.

Data domains

Our first preference is to manage data of the collection domain. Apart from this we are specialised to manage, store and archive observation/ monitoring data.

IT services

Data submission and accession:

• Mapping services for DiversityCollection Import

Data integration and management:

• Diversity Workbench Metadata data bases and repositories; remote data management by researchers possible, see: Diversity Workbench Client Software.
• Morph·D·Base and easyDB multimedia data repository.

Data publication:

• Metadata on species occurences: collections.zfmk.de, Europeana, and GBIF Data publisher
• Media: Morph·D·Base and easyDB