iSpot & EML project blog

The MegaLab officially stopped gathering data as of 31st October. This does not mean that the site is no longer available, in fact it’s business as usual for the Evolution MegaLab but it does mean that analysis has now begun on the data that has been collected to date. So to help with this I’ve added two new fields to the full data download that’s available to privileged users, these are: an id field that gives a unique reference to every line of the download, and the date the record was published – this is different from the date the record was made.

It’ll be interesting to hear the outcomes of the data analysis!

This week has seen the addition of links to both EOL and the NBN in iSpot. These links have been added to all identifications that have a valid taxon name in the NBN species dictionary, the scientific name is given precedence but if the scientific name is invalid and there is a valid English name then that is used instead. At present these links are only created once the identification has been published but I feel these links may be a good aid prior to publishing an identification and so it may be a good idea to look into how best to let users use these resources separately from publishing identifications.

As well as these links being added some of the other things that we’ve also done are as follows:

• Rich has added more custom reports for use by the iSpot team including User statistics which has some interesting information
• The active S159 students now have a badge so they can spot each other on the site
• it’s now possible to view who’s agreed with an identification, this still needs a bit of work to get the popup using a fixed size box and then the use of a scroll bar but it’s usable for the time being
• many small improvements to both the look & feel and functionality spread throughout the site!!