Mandala: Output, Data Manipulation, & Report Structuring

MANDALA has been designed to organize and output data in informative ways. Three broad categories are touched on below.

Internal Use. MANDALA is a research tool. New data are constantly being added; ongoing structural changes are making data more easily accessible. It is composed of data in various stages of verification; literal transcription of the label information and a value added version that fills in knowledge gaps such as geographical coordinates; and constructed not only with valid and invalid taxonomic names but also with working, manuscript, and in press names in mind. For this reason we differentiate between what we offer to the general public on the WWW and what is intended for internal, prepublished use. Specimens in MANDALA have links to taxonomic names, collecting events, illustrations, literature, associated specimens, plant associations, ecological and bioactivity associations 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 ID, developmental stage collected and in collection, and pupation and emergence dates. The taxonomic names file (NAMES.FP3) allows the user to document all facets of name use, including references verifying that use. Using MANDALA to track museum loans and provide counts of available specimens of each species, Gaimari was able to organize loan returns and additional specimen distributions of some 35,000 Ozodiceromyia specimens.
Client Requests. We have addressed a host of questions about therevids using our MANDALA database from a number of client groups, e.g., generated a report on therevids from Florida (including species, collecting dates, and counties) for Gary Steck (Florida State Collection of Arthropods); generated a list of species and specimens found in the National Parks and National Monuments of Colorado for Virginia Scott (University of Colorado at Boulder Museum). We have also routinely used the database to generate accurate and detailed accounts of material on loan from various museums and material being returned to those museums.
Publication and Poster Layout. Gaimari generated a specimens examined list from MANDALA for his thesis and upcoming publications. He and others have used MANDALA to output the literature cited for publications. Metz and Irwin's symposium presentation on the Therevidae of Baja California was made possible by data recorded and manipulated in MANDALA. The geographical coordinates data were exported from the database to RangeMapper™ for plotting distributions.