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Biodiversity Information Infrastructure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa

Biodiversity Information Infrastructure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Theeten Franck, Bart Meganck, An Tombeur, Danny Meirte, Patricia Mergen, Michel Louette. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Leuvensesteenweg 13, 3080 Tervuren, Belgium.

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Biodiversity Information Infrastructure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa

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  1. Biodiversity Information Infrastructure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa Theeten Franck, Bart Meganck, An Tombeur, Danny Meirte, Patricia Mergen, Michel Louette Royal Museum for Central Africa, Leuvensesteenweg 13, 3080 Tervuren, Belgium Several collections of the RMCA have been provided to the Global Biodiversity Information and the European Network for Biodiversity Information (see: http://data.gbif.org), in collaboration with the Belgian Node of the GBIF, such as the birds, cichlids and butterflies from the Albertian Rift and the fruit flies from the afro-tropical regions (see: http://projects.bebif.be/enbi/projects). The instittution is also involved in the development of GIS applications for several projects founded by the European Union, such as SYNTHESYS-NAD (implementation of an algorithm for the integration, validation and quality check of itinerary data, see: http://synthesys.africamuseum.be) and EDIT WP5 (Development of an integrated platform for Cybertaxonomy, see: http://www.e-taxonomy.eu) . Since 2007 we installed our own BioCase, DiGIR and TaPIR servers, in order to provide data about our herpetological collections to the GBIF and the HerpNET project (http://ww.herpnet.org). This installation could be a starting point for a future contribution to digitalisation and data gathering projects, such as: -’EContentPlus’ (European initiative for the public access to digital contents), -’Life Watch’ (European initiative to link ecological monitoring databases), - ‘SABIN’ (‘Sub-Saharan African Biodiversity Information Network’), whose aim is to involve scientists from Central African countries and RMCAin the development of a network accessing and sharing data, by using internationally recognized standards and tools as recommended by GBIF and TDWG. The Royal Museum for Central Africa has several zoological and biological databases for the documentation of its collections. The main database features about 198 000 records on specimens and 27 800 records on gathering places, with approximately 25% of them having their geographic coordinates specified by the collector. This system is divided into three big functional modules: -the collection specimens, -the taxonomical information, -the geographical information, based both on gazetteer information and on information furnished by the collector. This database is implemented on a ‘Dataperfect’ system and currently being migrated to a modern SQL platform (called ‘MIDAS’ for ‘MIgration of DAtabaSe’), with a web-interface allowing the internet consultation of the data. This migration process also aims to centralise the auxiliary databases of the zoological section RMCA. RMCA is involved in the development of a procedural language allowing treatment, standardisation and historical conservation of taxonomical information, which will extend the functionalities of the migrated database. Tervuren http://www.africamuseum.be Collections: Zoology: Vertebrate zoology 1 285 500 specimens Entomology 6 287 000 specimens Non-Insect invertebrates 165 160 specimens Palaeontology: 21 500 specimen Geology and Mineralogy: 215 773 samples 10 000 preparations 300 m of files about geological and mining archives 20 000 maps,300 000 aerial images and 500 satellite images. Agricultural and Forest economy: 60 000 wood samples 50 000 microtomic slides 500 specimen of tropical crops Cultural Anthropology: 180 000 ethnographic objects 8200 musical instruments 410 000 photographs 88 414 objects in archaeology 6000 hours of music recording. History: 2000 historical objects 4000 works of modern art, 3000 historical maps, 420 000 photo- graphic archives,1 km of files from private and company archives. Stanley archives: 65 journals and notebooks, 10.000 letters, photo- graphs, drawings, maps and manuscripts. I.T. infrastructure of the RMCA Tervuren Tervuren Legend: Contact info: franck.theeten@africamuseum.be Website: http://www.africamuseum.be Poster presented at the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), Annual Conference 2007, Bratislava, Slovakia, 16-22 September 2007

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