From the introduction.The UMASS-Boston Electronic Field Guide Project , UMB-EFG  provides a web-accessible distributed object-oriented database for the identification of biological specimens from field observations. The data, including both taxonomic and environmental or ecological data, will aid in identification by building a context for each observation. As observation data accumulates, larger-scale ecological studies can be carried out using the data. UMB-EFG is being constructed and populated under The EFG project has recently been expanded to encompass investigation of a number of issues and solutions under discussion in the eco-informatics community, including the use of XML for federation of data from disparate distributed database, as well as for more common tasks such as data exchange and system configuration. This paper describes our engineering approach to the building of these systems and reports on their current status.
The paper is derived from a presentation at the 2000 International Congress of Entomologists (ICE2000).

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Electronic field guides and user communities in the eco-informatics revolution. Conservation Ecology 7(1): 3. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss1/art3

Abstract: The recognition that taxonomy is central to the conservation of biodiversity has reestablished the critical role of taxonomy in biology. However, many of the tools taxonomists produce for the identification and characterization of species, e.g., dichotomous keys, have been difficult to use and largely ignored by the general public in favor of field guides, which are essentially browsable picture guides. We review the role of field guides in species identification and discuss the application of a host of digital technologies to produce user-friendly tools for identification that are likely to greatly enhance species identification in the field by nonspecialists. We suggest that wider adoption of the citizen science model and the use of electronic field guides will enhance public understanding and participation in biodiversity monitoring.
KEY WORDS: bioinformatics, birding, citizen science, ecoinformatics, field biology, field guides, species identification, taxonomic keys, taxonomy.

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Database-backed decision trees with application to biological informatics. 2005, Robert A. Morris, Jacob K. Asiedu, William Haber, Fred SaintOurs, Robert D. Stevenson and Hua Tang.  To appear, J. Intelligent Information Systems.[PDF]

Abstract.We describe a mechanism for the identification of biological organisms through the use of enhanced taxonomic keys–decision trees with nodes augmented by property lists that can serve as arguments to web or local services that access databases or other resources about species, specimens, and ecosystems. Authors of these identification schemes can use simple spreadsheet tools to structure the identification abstractions, and middleware renders the resulting trees into many different forms, with the databases possibly discovered and queried at the time an identification is proposed.

 See also http://efg.cs.umb.edu/keys/

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An Architecture For Electronic Field Guides.2005, Robert A. Morris, Robert D. Stevenson and William Haber. To appear, J. Intelligent Information Systems. [PDF]

Abstract: People who classify and identify things based on their observable or deducible properties (called “characters” by biologists) can benefit from databases and keys that assist them in naming a specimen. This paper discusses our approach to generating an identification tool based on the field guide concept. Our software accepts character lists either expressed as XML (which biologists rarely provide knowingly—although most databases can now export in XML) or via ODBC connections to the data author’s relational database. The software then produces an Electronic Field Guide (EFG) implemented as a collection of Java servlets. The resulting guide answers queries made locally to a backend, or to Internet data sources via http, and returns XML. If, however, the query client requires HTML (e.g., if the EFG is responding to a human-centric browser interface that we or the remote application provides), or if some specialized XML is required, then the EFG forwards the XML to a servlet that applies an XSLT transformation to provide the look and feel that the client application requires. We compare our approach to the architecture of other taxon identification tools. Finally, we discuss how we combine this service with other biodiversity data services on the web to make integrated applications.

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