I spotted a way cool web service at the [http://annualmeeting.nsdl.org/ National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Annual Meeting] earlier this week in Washington, D.C.. Paul Allen, Assistant Director, Information Science, [http://birds.cornell.edu/ Cornell Lab of Ornithology], presented the NSF-NSDL funded project Visualizing Biodiversity Online. The Biodiversity Analysis Pipeline is a collaborative environment for students to create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data and is due to launch later this month and will utilize Fedora as a storage layer.
Project description: The Biodiversity Analysis Pipeline (BAP) is a collaborative, interactive online environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. It is built to support inquiry-based learning within a "Web 2.0" environment, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites (e.g. blogs) for dissemination and consumption beyond the BAP environment itself. BAP allows anyone to access, analyze, and visualize the huge volume of primary biodiversity data currently available online. BAP provides access to powerful scientific analyses and workflows through an intuitive, rich web interface based on the visual programming paradigm, similar to Yahoo Pipes. Analyses and visualizations are authored in an open, collaborative environment which allows existing analyses and visualizations to be shared, modified, repurposed, and enhanced.
Behind the scenes, BAP is based on the Kepler scientific workflow software which is used by professional scientists for analysis and modeling. BAP brings that scientific power to new audiences by consolidating the same workflow components used by scientists into pieces that have more intuitive meaning, and by providing components specifically targeted to these audiences. Because BAP provides tools for original data analyses rather than visualizations of predetermined analyses, it empowers users to develop new and valuable results. Those results can be exposed as dynamic web resources, in web contexts unrelated to BAP itself. Finally, because of the generality of the Kepler scientific system upon which BAP is built, this online system can be extended to science and engineering disciplines beyond the environmental sciences.