The Specify Network consists of tools and services to serve the Specify Collections Consortium. There are currently several elements in production, and some still in development.
This work has been supported by NSF Awards NSF BIO-1458422, OCI-1234983.
The Specify Broker searches for information related to an occurrence object information from other data services, such as GBIF, iDigBio, OpenTreeOfLife, ITIS, WoRMS, and more. It presents the related digital object elements in a frontend, primarily accessed through the Specify application.
The Specify Broker houses objects and common tools used within a Broker installation that may also be useful for outside contributors and the community as a whole.
The Specify Network Analyst is in development, and will be a set of specimen-based analytics assessing the composition of collection holdings and available species information.
Individual collections will be compared with data downloaded regularly from GBIF: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download?basis_of_record=PRESERVED_SPECIMEN&basis_of_record=FOSSIL_SPECIMEN&basis_of_record=OCCURRENCE&advanced=1&occurrence_status=present
These data are used to compare and assess collections against and among the collective holdings globally distributed data. The analytics are then returned to the contributing institutions and others to assist those collections in prioritizing collecting and digitization efforts, institutional loans, mergers, deaccessions, and more, to improve, the overall quality of the collection. This information can also be used by the community as a whole to identify gaps in species knowlege or redundancies.
The Analyst presents this information in multivariate-, but subsettable, space to provide as much value and feedback to the community as possible.