Facilitating interdiciplinary sciences by the integration of a CLOSi-based database with bio-metadata

Biodiversity information has been collected and compiled during many unrelated and independent projects across Amazon region. Institutions on their own maybe unable to answer crucial questions, as their answers may depend on a multi-disciplinary context. Since their situation is still considerably isolated, some solutions adopted impose redundancy leading to high costs. The use of computer technology has been a fundamental resource for biological information management. However, such information is heterogeneous and to understand and automatically manage it accurate schema representation and formal metadata description are needed. This paper presents concepts of the CLOSi schema, which was conceived to ease and stimulate the development of biological collection databases. The schema represents functional groups that are specified in terms of object classes and their relationships. Another important issue presented, is the management of good quality bio-metadata that can be integrated with the data. For that, we implemented a solution to gather, manage and disseminate biological metadata, which is integrated with our CLOSi-based database. The FGDC metadata standard was adopted and represented as an XML schema. The schema was mapped to a well-formed XML template. A client/server infrastructure was tested to manage and disseminate data and metadata about Amazonian biodiversity.