Informatics Products & Services

KU BI Informatics focuses on imagining, designing and implementing biological collections software for research data publication, analysis and management.

Software

We develop and support a multi-platform database system for the digitization and curation of museum specimen information, as well as a suite of software tools and web services for computing and visualizing models of species distributions based on climate and museum specimen data.

We have a 25-year track record of engineering and supporting high quality research software. Our technology staff actively collaborates with research informatics laboratories in the U.S. and internationally to develop leading edge, open source, biodiversity software solutions, including biodiversity computing middleware, data repositories, network protocols, and science education materials.

Specify Collections Consortium

The Specify Consortium is a cyberinfrastructure collaboration with researchers at hundreds of biological museums who use Specify Software, and with bioinformatics programmers around the world with whom we collaborate to maintain and extend the software platform.

Specify software. Founding partners: Danish Natural History Museum, Florida Museum, UM LSA, KU BI

Training

We offer workshops on the use and configuration of Specify for research collections management. Workshops are hosted by a requesting institution, we provide the instructor and materials. The sessions are an efficient way to quickly master Specify’s interface and functions for processing biological museum data recrods.

Legacy Data Conversions

We deconstruct institutional legacy collection databases and map their data contents to Specify's modern, multi-disciplinary database design. Migrating existing data to Specify can be done to ensure completeness and so that the new data set takes advantage of Specify's database and user interface data form design. We customize data forms for newly migrated data so that all historical data fields are visible and usable.

Project Planning

Our Division researchers and engineers have deep expertise in biological collections research, data concepts, and software options. We collaborate with institutions and their collections

researchers to derive effective software and specimen processing strategies for specimen data analysis and management. We provide and support software solutions with the goal of producing innovative, efficient, and sustainable biodiversity community cyberinfrastructure.