About Mandala

About Mandala!

Mandala is a suite of 23 interrelated database tables (see Overview and Model), which uses the popular cross-platform database application, FileMaker™ Pro. Mandala supports four major realms of data acquisition and management for systematics and biodiversity studies: specimens, literature, taxonomic names, and illustrations. The name Mandala means interconnectedness and interrelatedness and the imagery inspiring its use was derived from a passage in a detective novel by Jane Dentinger. The term is also used to describe beautiful, intricately designed sand paintings.

Mandala can be used to

track museum loans, specimens, bulk samples & their subsamples;

detail the complex history of a taxonomic name;

export a multitude of data for phenological plots, specimens examined lists, and distribution maps;

provide direct URLs to GenBank records;

catalogue images and illustrations;

store and link literature to appropriate taxonomic names, specimens, illustrations, and collecting localities; and

record numerous details about individual specimens including a literal transcription of the label(s), enhanced locality and collecting event data as interpreted from the label(s), taxonomic determination history, physical condition of the specimen and how it has been preserved, ecological/biological associations with other collected specimens or other taxa associated but not collected, type designation, and other relevant information.

Created as part of a systematics project on stiletto flies (Insecta: Diptera: Therevidae), the development of Mandala was funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy programs (DEB 95-21925 and DEB 99-77958), the NSF-sponsored Fiji Bioinventory of Arthropods (DEB 04-25790) and the Schlinger Foundation. It was developed by Gail Kampmeier with major input by the following therevid PEETsters: Michael Irwin (Principal Investigator), F. Chris Thompson (consultant), and Kevin Holston, Steve Gaimari, Mark Metz, and Martin Hauser (former and current graduate students), Christine Lambkin, Don Webb (collaborator), and Amanda Buck and Kristin Algmin (database team). Numerous others have had an impact on the shaping of Mandala, including all of the students who have worked on data entry. Mandala is also being used for taxa other than flies with only a few minor modifications and was used in the 2001 Allerton Biodiversity Blitz and the 2005 Busey Woods BioBlitz.

Mandala is a research tool and data manager. New data may be constantly be added, enhanced, and updated. Ongoing structural changes from user requests facilitate data input and enhance ease of output. Data in Mandala may be in various stages of verification and completeness.

Specimens in Mandala have unique numbers that are linked to taxonomic names, localities and collecting events, illustrations, literature, associated specimens, other associated organisms, ecological and behavioral observations via a controlled vocabulary, biogeographic regions, loan and deposit information from collections, determinations, and a wealth of other characteristics about the physical specimen itself, including sex, mounted state, dissections, GENBANK Accession Numbers and URLs, developmental stage collected and in collection, and pupation and emergence dates.

The taxonomic names file (TAXA) allows the user to document all facets of name use, including references verifying that use. The history of a taxonomic name can be extremely complex, requiring the attention of a professional systematist, yet a taxonomic record does not need to be complete to be functional e.g., attaching a working name to a specimen. The construction of Mandala allows not only the tracking of valid and invalid taxonomic names but also of working, manuscript, and in press names. The relational framework of Mandala allows the automatic display of homonyms as well as a full synonymic list of names linked to any valid name, which may be exported for nomenclatural catalogues.

Mandala can be used to track museum loans, both as the institution or person providing the loan and the one receiving it.

Mandala is fully cross-platform for any Macintosh or Windows machine that is capable of running FileMaker Pro 7/8.x/9. It may be searched on the web using FileMaker's Instant Web Publishing Engine (Fiji Arthropod Survey (see Advanced Search); Therevid PEET project), and a php search engine is now working for the Fiji arthropod data and the Therevid fly data, with plans to connect to GBIF's worldwide network in 2008.

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