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This is a tool to allow naturalists around the UK to record species information directly into their own websites and to the NBN Internet Gateway. It will also help organisers of recording schemes co-ordinate their volunteer recorders and to ensure that their records are accurate and detailed. The tools being developed will be completely open source and ideally have been developed with significant input from the community itself. The money will be used to work with the community to develop the tools to their needs and for the hiring of developers to design the software.
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Situation
There is currently rapidly rising interest across both local biological records centres and national biological recording schemes and natural history societies in using the internet to both capture and deliver species information. In particular the recent successes we have had with on-line capture projects, for example BirdTrack (BTO) and the Harlequin ladybird survey, have been testament to the potential of uptake and improved efficiency of data capture through this route. In parallel with this the National Biodiversity Netowrk Trust has invested heavily in developing a suite of web services to allow users to create customised Gateway outputs on their own websites. The overall requirement is for a standard suite of tools that can be easily installed and configured by a relatively non-technical user. In other words the package should install in the same way as any web based application and would allow a variety of basic parameters to be configured through a set of administrative interfaces. The look and feel would be controlled through style sheets. The basic toolbox would be extendable by someone with deeper knowledge of the technology on which it was based but ‘out of the box’ would include for example: • On-line data entry • On-line atlas functionality • Forums • Easy to use management tool for basic website content • Maintenance of a meetings diary (and possibility to share across broader interest groups) A key aspect of the tool kit would be that it would be completely open source and ideally have been developed with significant input from the community itself.