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Data Management for Biodiversity and Conservation

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This is a joint project with Professor Montenegro at the Department of Ecology, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and Professor Timmermann at the College of Pharmacy , University of Arizona. The objective is to have a database on the Internet that will allow content- based retrieval of images of Chilean flora for use by the academic community and others interested in information about the botanical bio-diversity of Chile. An intelligent agent to facilitate queries based on user-specific profiles is to be designed.

Dr. Montenegro is a well-known botanist and conservationist. The images and information represent over 25 years of effort and experience in the field. The database contains images and their associated botanical information. The images have been collected from the various regions of Chile and depict vegetation types of the different Matorral (desertic, coastal, Andine), Altiplain, Steppe, Alpine, Desertic, Temperate forest and Chilean forest. Besides regular keyword searches, users can also carry out "image content" based searches for information about the plants.

Information to be contained in the database includes the phylogenetic details, data about distribution, seasonality, uses and the state of conservation of the plant. This is in addition to the semantic information about the image contents. The database is to be designed using a state of the art RDBMS with a Java front-end.

Later we hope to integrate links to various sites and provide a unified query interface that will allow users to search multiple botanical sites simultaneously and be presented with the consolidated results.

For more information, please contact us.