BioCASE - the Biodiversity Collection Access Service for Europe
BioCASE is a web-based information service providing researchers with unified access to biological collections across Europe, while leaving control of the information with the collection holders. Using web portals or customised applications, it enables researchers to simultaneously query hundreds of collection databases, ranging from fossil collections to DNA banks.
The network is co-coordinated by the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, which holds a meta-database with data on more than 18 000 European collections, as well as by the Central Registry for Distributed Data Repositories already linked to the system.
BioCASE data providers are also linked to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) that aims to make primary biodiversity data available at a global level.
The demonstration will show how BioCASE - being built on a flexible and stable XML specification - uses GÉANT2 to give access to very different specimens such as images of animal observations in the field, XML descriptions of collection specimens, movies taken from micro-algae, and high-resolution herbarium sheets.
