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New computer database tool for STRI

STRI upgrading its online presence

by Eric Jackson

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has announced a new website, linked to its existing one, that has a lot of new scientific database tools. The site is up at http://biogeodb.stri.si.edu/bioinformatics and already contains a lot things about botanical research done at Barro Colorado Island and at the STRI herbarium, with some zoological items as well. STRI's impressive map library has been unified in the new site, with tools that make it useful in many different ways. Over the coming months it will plug in with many of the databased on many subjects --- not only biological --- that STRI scientists study, and will also be linked with other major scientific databases around Panama, the Latin America - Caribbean region and the world.

The aim, said Steve Paton of STRI's Office of Bioinformatics, is to bring order out of chaos and "maximize the quantity, quality and value of STRI's scientific data on the web."

The first part of the job was to create a huge web capacity for the ambitious task. Then came the phase, still underway but also largely done, of creating navigation, file sharing and search tools that allow scientists to publish want they wish to the general public, share more sensitive things with selected colleagues or not at all, and to interconnect with many other scientific databases.

So will you be able to find the Panamanian Spanish name of that bird at your feeder? Well, the incorporation of the local Audubon - STRI bird database into the new website is coming soon, and there will be some Panamanian Spanish names. However, our local Spanish dialects have many words for certain species and certain words that pertain to more than one species, a problem that the Spanish language has in general, so don't look for the new website to definitively resolve all linguistic problems of this sort anytime soon.

Even if STRI is mainly known for its studies of tropical forests and marine ecosystems, biology is not the only thing that it does. There have long archaeologists at STRI, and the social sciences are also represented both as a minority among the specialties and when biologists have to deal with issues in their fields that have social components --- things like studying what happens when forests are cut down do, after all, have a human element. And although the web designers call this new tool a bioinformatics website and are concentrating on plants and animals now, but they will get into other fields of biology like the study of single-cell organisms as well, and may even in time add STRI's archaeological data.

And, said Paton, to the extent that everything works as planned, "it will make it easy for someone to come into STRI and find what they want to find without having to learn anything new" about using the website and its features.