The document discusses leveraging filtered push technology to improve remote taxonomic identifications through the Symbiota platform, as part of the digitization of biodiversity collections. It highlights the objectives of digitizing records of southwestern ground-dwelling arthropods, including a target of 1 million records and 16,000 high-resolution images. The paper outlines ongoing work, the use of new client tools for annotation, and future plans for optimizing user interfaces and expanding the expert community within the project.

1. Leveraging Filtered Push Technology to
Enhance Remote Taxonomic Identifications
Nico Franz1, Edward Gilbert1, Neil Cobb2 & Paul Morris3
1
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
2 Merriam-Powell Center, Northern Arizona University
3 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
TDWD 2013 Annual Conference, Florence, Italy
Biodiversity Data Quality – Issues, Methods and Tools
October 29, 2013

2. Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity
Collections (NSF ADBC Program)
 Digitize 1 billion specimens in 10 years
Currently 9 Thematic Collection Networks with 130 participating institutions

3. SCAN member collections
ASU
Average ~ 480 miles apart
UNM
TAMU
UA
NMSU
NAU
TTU
CSU
DMNS
UCB

4. SCAN digitization objectives
• Digitize 1 million records for southwestern ground-dwelling arthropods
• Produce 16,000 high-resolution images of species; promote identifications
• Leverage an interactive identification & annotation workflow via Symbiota
Gerstaeckeria porosa (LeConte, 1876) – ASUHIC0017017
Crotanius trivittatus (Champion, 1908) – ASUHIC0012067

5. September, 2013: 510,262 records in SCAN
SCAN ADBC Collections
SCAN ADBC
Ground-Dwelling
Arthropod Records
•
•
•
•
•
•
510,262 specimens in Symbiota
300,984 (59%) georeferenced
338,836 (66%) identified to species
1,016 families
 Primary need:
8,056 genera
remote IDs
17,538 species
SCAN ADBC
Non-Target Taxa
Records
SCAN Broader Impact Collections
SCAN Non-ADBC
Broader Impact
Records

6. Deployment diagram – Symbiota & Filtered Push interaction
New FP Client Tools in Symbiota
Filtered Push3 Node
http://symbiota1.acis.ufl.edu/scan/portal/index.php
http://fp3.acis.ufl.edu/FPAnnotationProcessor-Web/
SCAN Symbiota Portal
• New, remotely added identifications are grounded in the Annotation Ontology.
• FP team has developed Symbiota-integrated PHP Client Tools that record and
push new annotations to the external FP infrastructure where statistics are kept.
Source: http://wiki.filteredpush.org/wiki/FP-Medium_deployment_for_SCAN

7. Current workings & look in SCAN

8. Homepage – http://symbiota1.acis.ufl.edu/scan/portal/index.php
Images

9. Image thumbnail gallery – some are insufficiently identified
ID = Epicaerus
ID = Scarabaeidae

10. More information – occurrence records, images – is clicks away

11. More information – occurrence records, images – is clicks away

12. Experts can log in and view a taxon-tailored IDs Needed tab
This is the scarab
in need of an ID

13. Experts can log in and view a taxon-tailored IDs Needed tab
Occurrence tab
This is the scarab
in need of an ID

14. Experts can log in and view a taxon-tailored IDs Needed tab
Occurrence tab
This is the scarab
in need of an ID
Images tab

15. Adding a new identification in the Determination History tab
 Scientific Name is linked to the
SCAN Taxonomic Thesaurus.

16. The fully integrated Symbiota tab for IDs is Filtered Push-enabled
• New = current ID
• Image remapping
• Submission to FP

17. Simultaneous ID recording internally (SCAN) and externally (FP)
Confirmation
in SCAN

18. Simultaneous ID recording internally (SCAN) and externally (FP)
Confirmation
in SCAN
AO translation
Confirmation
in FP3 node
Annotations
list view

19. Simultaneous ID recording internally (SCAN) and externally (FP)
Confirmation
in SCAN
AO translation
Confirmation
in FP3 node
Annotations
detail view
RDF / XML
translation

20. Future work – 1st production-level Symbiota / FP implementation
• Optimization of SCAN "IDs Needed" user interface – thumbnail view
• Roll-out to the SCAN expert community, creation of expert profiles in FP
• Expansion beyond SCAN members, diversified notification systems
"Curculionidae" ("Calles" sp.) – ASUHIC0031695

21. Acknowledgments
• TDWG 2013 Symposium organizers – Antonio Mauro Saraiva
• James Hanken, Maureen Kelly & David Lowery – http://wiki.filteredpush.org/wiki/
• ASUHIC digitization team – Sangmi Lee, David Fleming, Soon Flynn, Andrew Jansen,
Catherine Mercado, Joshua Persson, Sarah Shirota, Michael Shillingburg.
• NSF Award EF-1207107.
"Digitization TCN: Collaborative Research: Southwest Collections of Arthropods
Network (SCAN): a Model for Collections Digitization to Promote Taxonomic and Ecological Research."
https://sols.asu.edu
http://symbiota1.acis.ufl.edu/scan/portal/index.php
http://symbiota.org/tiki/tiki-index.php
http://taxonbytes.org