Biodiversity Institute Partners with Swedish Museum of Natural History on Specify Software Development

The Specify Software Project is enthused to announce a software co-development collaboration with the Swedish Museum of Natural History (NRM) to create extensions to Specify for the web. NRM scientists and software developers will share the design vision and engineering tasks with Project staff in the Biodiversity Institute to produce a Specify web client (program) for browser-based access to remote Specify databases. The web client will complement the three desktop software versions of Specify currently available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux computers. The web client will enable new kinds of collaborations among collections institutions--a single Specify installation will now be accessible over the internet for querying, data entry and other analytical functions with data from multiple collections and institutions. The effort will also produce a web portal for Specify which will be a more traditional web site for open access to specimen data held in Specify databases. The Specify web client and web portal will be available and supported as open source extensions to Specify in 2012.