SPICE (Species 2000 Interoperability Co-ordination Environment)

Jones, Andrew Clifford, Brugman, M. L., Gray, William Alexander and White, Richard John 2006. SPICE (Species 2000 Interoperability Co-ordination Environment). Cardiff: Cardiff University.

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Abstract

A significant long-term barrier to creating a catalogue of life for the biological community has been the worldwide distribution, in varied formats, of information about known species among taxonomic specialists. The Species 2000 Interoperability Coordination Environment (SPICE) architecture (http://biodiversity.cs.cf.ac.uk/spice) resolves this by providing a widely-used database federation which accesses distributed databases containing specialist taxonomic information. The current SPICE architecture was developed through international collaboration in the Species 2000 europa project (2003-2006). It comprises Global Species Databases (GSDs); wrappers translating between GSD data models and SPICE's Common Data Model (CDM); a Common Access System (CAS) assembling information from the wrapped databases; and a web front-end. Wrapper/CAS communication takes place using either a CORBA-based or an HTTP/XML-based protocol; the CAS provides a web service interface for other systems to access SPICE directly. Cardiff led the software workpackage in the Species 2000 europa project which addressed the architectural design and development of SPICE. The system can operate with 200+ autonomous databases, each controlled by its supplying institution and having its own structure. It is designed to provide current information as the taxonomic knowledge evolves. This has resulted in experimentation with caching strategies and development of scalable CORBA-based and HTTP-based approaches which have been empirically validated. SPICE supports individual web users discovering species information interactively, but it also supports organisations using its web services to obtain a 'taxonomic backbone' for their own services. These organisations include GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), the Encyclopedia of Life and SpeciesBase programmes, Consortium for the Barcode of Life, GenBank and World Conservation Union. Using 50 institutions, SPICE delivers the Species 2000 'Catalogue of Life' containing over one million of the estimated 1.8 million known species. The Species 2000 secretariat reports that the web portal currently receives 40 million hits per year, from tens of thousands of individual users.

Item Type:	Other
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Publisher:	Cardiff University
Related URLs:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/136... https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/147...
Last Modified:	27 Feb 2025 14:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/1889

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