THE%20INFORMATION%20SYSTEM%20ON%20THE%20MARINE%20ANIMALS%20COLLECTION%20IN%20THE%20ZOOLOGICAL%20INSTITUTE%20OF%20RAS

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• THE INFORMATION SYSTEM ON THE MARINE ANIMALS
  COLLECTION IN THE ZOOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF RAS
• I.S. SMIRNOV, E.P. VORONINA, A.L. LOBANOV A.V.
  NEYELOV

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The Zoological Institute (ZIN) in St. Petersburg
houses one of the world's largest zoological
collections.
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The marine invertebrate collection contains over
100 thousand samples of 26 thousand species.
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The ichthyological collection contains over 160
thousand catalogued specimens of about 8700
species of marine and freshwater fishes of the
world fauna.
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The development of the electronic databases
started at the Zoological Institute in 1987,
firstly on marine invertebrates, and then, in
1991, on fish.
This is Amstrad 1640 DD our first PC at the
Zoological Institute.
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The information retrieval system OCEAN designed
at the Zoological Institute consists of 4 main
tables the taxonomic table containing the name
and nomenclature of taxa, the station table
including the data of field books, the collection
table of museum collections, and bibliographic
table.
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In the process of organizing the faunistic and
ecological data and Information systems, two main
problems appeared1) input and use of scientific
names, especially synonyms and2)
standardization of geographical data.

• The first problem is being solved using the
  classificators (special taxonomic databases) of
  scientific names of animals based on the
  user-friendly and periodically updated ZOOCOD
  standard, popular among the Russian institutions
  dealing with the biodiversity research.

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A structure of a ZOOCODs classificator

• --------------------------------------------------
  --------------------------------------------------
  --------
• GENUS LATNAM SYN RANCOD ABBR
  SYSCOD
• --------------------------------------------------
  --------------------------------------------------
  --------
• Animalia 1 AN
  100
• Arthropoda 10 AR
  110
• Crustacea 20 CR
  120
• Insecta 20 IN
  130
• Coleoptera 40 INCO
  13010
• Diptera 40 INDI
  13013
• Chordata 10 CH
  140
• Mammalia 20 MA
  150
• Primates 40 MAPR
  15010
• Pongidae 50 MAPRPO
  15010100
• Hylobatidae 50 MAPRHY
  15010100
• Gorilla 70
  MAPRPOGOR 150101001000
• Gorilla gorilla 90
  MAPRPOGORGOR 1501010010001000
• Pan 70
  MAPRPOPAN 150101001010
• Hominidae 50 MAPRHO
  15010105
• Homo 70
  MAPRHOHOM 150101051000

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Standard of hierarchy of taxonomic
categories,codes of their ranks and rank
appropriate endings used in the Zoological
Institute
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• Coordinates and the developed geographical
  information system were used to solve the second
  problem.

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• The Zoological Institute continues to participate
  in the 4 international projects on creation of
  marine invertebrates and fish databases
• CNAMF - Computer Network for Arctic Marine Fauna
  (NATO) (1999-2000)
• HELCOM project Invasive
• Species of the Baltic Sea (2003- ) see
  poster
• FishBASE (2004 - )
• ArctCoML - Arctic Census of Marine Life (2004 -)

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• The ichthyological part of the taxonomic table
  contains about 5700 records all high-level taxa
  including families, species of fish and fish-like
  animals of the Antarctic Region,
  Pleuronectiformes and some families of
  Scorpaeniformes of the World. It is exhibited as
  a list on the web site of the Zoological
  Institute.

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• Databases on marine invertebrates now contain
  more than 40000 station records from more than
  175 expeditions and the information on chitons,
  bivalves and brittle stars collections.

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• International projects on the treatment of
  databases and information systems sharing
  biodiversity information on a global scale are
  developing. Data input in these projects usually
  is based on Latin symbols, but not on Cyrillic.
  This reduces the amount information on the
  original labels, hand-written in foreign
  languages, e.g. Russian.
• The information system OCEAN provides input of
  data and different queries using Cyrillic symbols
  along with the Latin ones.

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Advantages of the IRS Ocean(in comparison with
Artedian)

• 1. Station codes are generated automatically.
• 2. The important fields are filled in Russian
  in addition English (vessel and others).
• 3. Leading spaces are deleted automatically.
• 4. There are fields for GEAR, STATION NUMBER
  which provide an opportunity to verify location
  with a route table for marine expeditions).
• 5. There is EXPEDITION field (collectors may be
  different).
• 6. All geographical fields can be filled in
  with the help of dictionaries.
• 7. The number of specimens is not an obligatory
  field, but calculated one.

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Advantages of the IRS Artedian(in comparison
with Ocean)

• 1. Additional fields are designed for
  freshwater stations (everything concerning land).
• 2. By default more fields describing the object
  can be filled in comparison to the other program.
• 3. The collectors are treated in separate
  fields.
• 4. The IRS conforms to the Darwin Core in
  coordinates notation (degrees, minutes and
  seconds separately) and in treatment of land
  stations data (attached to lakes, rivers, states,
  provinces etc.)

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• It is necessary to study the experiences of
  different teams and attempt to create not ideal
  but optimal system for input and treatment of
  marine data.

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The majority of the Zoological Institute
specimens were collected by well-known Russian as
well as foreign expeditions. Route and station
data of only few expeditions were published in
special issues and for many years these works
were not available to specialists. Many other
expeditions produced only handwritten diaries.
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The development of an international expedition
database would be very interesting historically
and useful in standardizing future input of
collection data.
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Thank you very much!