Year 3 Therevid NSF PEET Report: Monographic Treatments

To Be Done
Summary of work to be performed during the next year of support, if changed from the original proposal; an indication of any current problems or favorable or unusual developments; and any other significan information pertinent to the type of project supported by NSF or as specified by the terms and conditions of the grant.

2A) Use of Electronic Media,

networking
databases
interactive keys
communications

 

2A Use of Electronic Media.

Networking. Several people have expressed interest in MANDALA, adapting all or portions of it for their taxonomic needs. Pam Arnofsky, postdoc working with Ami Scheltema, will spend a few days with Gail Kampmeier in late May working on this. Others have requested clones (structure, no records) of the databases, which can be sent via email or on diskette. Ms. Kampmeier will also be demonstrating MANDALA at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group meeting in Reading, England, in Sept. 1998.
Databases. Future plans for MANDALA include:

making the lots.fp3 database internally relational in a manner similar to the metamorphosis of the former taxa db to names.fp3

link a geographic region database to specimen locations,

implement the tracking of determiners (in determnr.fp3) and illustrators (in illus.fp3) via peo_join.fp3 (this side enabled already)

Interactive Keys. Over the next two years, we will adopt LUCID for keys of therevid taxa and use it in demonstrations to students of all ages as a example of how people go about identifying the organism they have in front of them.
Communications. We would like to make CD-ROMs of MANDALA available for distribution on a periodic basis. This will either require inclusion of a runtime version of FileMaker Pro (purchase of a license is required) on the CD-ROM or current access to FileMaker Pro 4.0 by the end user.

We also will have some parts of MANDALA web-accessible within the next year. Updates to the therevid WWW pages were recently made.

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