MAIS Searchable Database to be available soon!

We are developing a database of sites sampled in Mongolia (with associated geographic, habitat, and chemical data) and specimen-level data for the aquatic macroinvertebrates, which we expect to have accessible online in a short time!

Although we realize there are quite sophisticated solutions available, we have strived to develop an intuitive, simple, cross platform compatible (Mac OS X and Windows) database accessible to our collaborators from 6 countries and 12 institutions, many with no previous experience with a database other than an Excel spreadsheet. We also need to tailor our database to our specific data (e.g., extensive water chemistry data) and geographic region and fauna, and wanted a product we could easily modify ourselves as needed. A PI developed product will also insure the database remains updated even after project funding is exhausted. We have developed our database in FilemakerPro™ 8.5, which satisfies our requirements, with guidance and advice from colleague and collaborator Dr. Daniel Graf (he and Co-PI developed the project’s database: http://clade.acnatsci.org/mussel/).

Our database centers around 4 main tables (Fig. 1):
 Locality – geographic location;
 Collection Events – one or more collection events per geographic locality with associated photographs and physical and chemical data collected per event;
 Specimen – specimen data per collection event and associated photos of specimens (in life and study specimens); Nomenclature – classification of included and regional species.

We incorporate Darwin Core 2 fields (http://darwincore.calacademy.org/Documentation ) outlined by GBIF to allow interoperability with other databases. FileMaker allows ease of development of layouts for access in multiple ways including data input and queries; an example is given in Fig 2. Since collections are spread among many institutions, our input to date has been through use of Excel spreadsheets and will now distribute FileMaker Pro™ clones with the Master database maintained at ANSP (Gelhaus). We have posted a trial version to a website and retrieved the data successfully; we expect shortly to have trial web accessibility through this project site (http://clade.acnatsci.org/mongolia ) or linked pages. Academy of Natural Sciences staff will insure the secured web accessibility through development in MySQL and PHP protocols.

Fig. 1. Simplified entity relationship diagram (ERD) schematic of 4 main tables (Locality, Collection Event, Specimen, Nomenclature) and relationships for MAIS database in FileMaker Pro™ 8.5

Fig. 2. Sample of layout created in FileMakerPro™ 8.5