From beach at ku.edu Fri Oct 30 17:23:47 2009 From: beach at ku.edu (Beach, James H) Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:23:47 -0500 Subject: [Specifynews] Specify 6.1 C'est Arrive, GBIF IPT and NASA World Wind Integration Message-ID: <1BF826725F8C9C46A31440A31477401A336A12@MAILBOX-11.home.ku.edu> The Specify Software Project is delighted to announce the availability of Specify 6.1, a major update. Specify 6.1 supports the Global Biodiversity Information Facility's Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). The IPT creates an HTML web site and XML/TAPIR publishing of your collection's data. The IPT is an open-source, Java web application designed to publish biodiversity data on the Internet. See http://ipt.gbif.org for additional information on IPT. In Specify 6.1 we have integrated NASA's World Wind application as a Specify plug-in for live mapping of localities as part of the georeferencing support in Specify. World Wind's geospatial visualization capabilities are a nice complement to Specify's use of GEOLocate for obtaining latitude and longitude values for localities. See http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov for more information on Worldwind. We have also added robust support for Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) which are globally unique, persistent resource identifiers for uniquely labeling Specify Agents, Chronostratigraphy entries, Collection Objects, Geographical places, Journals, Lithostratigraphic units, Localities, Reference Works, and Taxon records. Specify can be configured to optionally generate LSIDs for all of these data objects. We've made some key changes to the handling of taxon and other tree data to greatly improve performance of Specify's tree displays and data entry forms when installed in a network server environment. We've measured performance enhancements of 5-7x in processing speed for data retrieval from the server databases. Our in house performance testing is done on our own entomological database with over a million collection object records. Specify 6.1 is downloadable now for all three desktop platforms from the Specify Project web site: http://www.specifysoftware.org . Registered collections will automatically receive and download the update as part of Specify's auto-update functions. Two additional applications, the new Specify Mobile WorkBench and a new easy-install version of Specify 6: "Specify EZDB" will be released next Monday, we'll have a lot more to say about those two new applications then. Post Mortem, We Sort 'em. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/specifynews/attachments/20091030/cce64251/attachment.html