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InvertNet: a new paradigm for digital access to invertebrate collections.

Chris Dietrich | John Hart | David Raila | Umberto Ravaioli | Nahil Sobh | Omar Sobh | Chris Taylor
ZooKeys | 2012

InvertNet, one of the three Thematic Collection Networks (TCNs) funded in the first round of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program, is tasked with providing digital access to ~60 million specimens housed in 22 arthropod (primarily insect) collections at institutions distributed throughout the upper midwestern USA. The traditional workflow for insect collection digitization involves manually keying information from specimen labels into a database and attaching a unique identifier label to each specimen. This remains the dominant paradigm, despite some recent attempts to automate various steps in the process using more advanced technologies. InvertNet aims to develop improved semi-automated, high-throughput workflows for digitizing and providing access to invertebrate collections that balance the need for speed and cost-effectiveness with long-term preservation of specimens and accuracy of data capture. The proposed workflows build on recent methods for digitizing and providing access to high-quality images of multiple specimens (e.g., entire drawers of pinned insects) simultaneously. Limitations of previous approaches are discussed and possible solutions are proposed that incorporate advanced imaging and 3-D reconstruction technologies. InvertNet couples efficient digitization workflows with a highly robust network infrastructure capable of managing massive amounts of image data and related metadata and delivering high-quality images, including interactive 3-D reconstructions in real time via the Internet.

Pubmed ID: 22859886

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RRID:SCR_004897

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 19 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. As of July 2011, there were editions of Wikipedia in 282 languages. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers. The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a combination of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia''s departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic content has been noted several times. Some have noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture), and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes. Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted. A 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica and had a similar rate of serious errors.

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