This thesis presents an overview of biological collections, their complexity and related bio-information management activities in the main institutes in the Amazon region

Santos, José Laurindo Campos dos

English

Species and genetic diversity in different ecosystems are important components of biodiversity. To find answers to crucial questions concerning how they function, millions of organisms collected from the tropical rainforest and its water bodies have been and continue to be deposited in biological collections. Large datasets were collected and compiled during many unrelated and independent studies across the Brazilian Amazon region since the last century. Individual researchers are unable to fully comprehend these data and information pools, as their current and newly arising questions may depend on multi-disciplinary contexts and on well-documented data. Since some institute activities are related, but others are not interrelated at all, the majority of adopted solutions of data ordinance at this moment suffer from redundancy, data inconsistency, and interpretation gaps, leading to high costs in labour, processing and infrastructure, and consequently have less than optimal scientific results. Computer technology has been a fundamental resource applied for bio-information management. For successful use of this technology, there are a number of requirements: an accurate information model, formal data and metadata management, as well as methods to integrate and revive legacy data, amongst others, by adding geographic information and analysis capability. This thesis presents an overview of biological collections, their complexity and related bio-information management activities in the main institutes in the Amazon region. The adopted functional and system analysis was the result of interactions by interviews, information requirement analysis, data flows and evaluation of descriptions, with the participation of researchers as users, and curators as information managers and data providers

A biodiversity information system in an open data/metadatabase architecture

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