BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

Anton Güntsch

BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

BGBM Collections

• Herbarium: 3.5M Specimens• Living Collection: 22000 species• Seed bank• DNA bank• Special collections

Digitization rate: ~10%High quality images: ~100000Hosting: 600000 records from 12 collections

BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

IT architecture

• 180 workstations• 45 Linux and Microsoft Servers (20

virtualized on VMWare)• 2 IBM Bladecenters with 170TB Storage• 8-node Linux-Cluster used with 454-

Sequencer• DBMS: SQL-Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL• CMS: Drupal, Wiki: MediaWiki• Backups: local storage cluster and archiving

facilities of the Freie Universität

BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

Collection management solutions (1)

• Accession System for the living collection including seed bank: BoGART (SQL-Server, Access clients)

• Central Herbarium Management (SQL-Server, Access clients)

• DNA-Bank (MySQL, PHP client)• Rapid data entry form including label

printing (EXCEL)• Several smaller database applications not

yet integrated into the Central Herbarium Management (e.g. Access, Specify)

BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

Collection management solutions (2)

(Almost) all collection databases are equipped with BioCASE/ABCD provider software.

Common access to BGBM collections at:

http://search.biocase.org/bgbm/

BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

Main issues faced

• Interoperability between systems (e.g. herbarium and fruit/seed collection)

• Annotation workflow• Common taxonomic backbone

BGBM IT infrastructure and collection management

Future plans

• Migrate herbarium database to an existing collection management system

• Candidates: Specify 6, DiversityCollection, Virtual Herbarium Vienna

• Testing is underway