my-plant.org - Phylogenetically Based Social Network for the Plant Sciences

http://www.my-plant.org

My-Plant.org is a social networking community for plant biologists, educators and other interested parties to come together to share information and research, collaborate, and stay on top of the latest developments in plant science. Part of the iPlant Collaborative, My-Plant.org is a key part of the community outreach, education and collaboration goals of the iPlant project. The My-Plant network is organized based on the phylogeny of plants so that users can easily gather around clades of interest related to various species and groups of species. As such, members and visitors can browse the network and follow the relationships between clades to discover new communities and develop collaborations related to their own work. My-Plant is more than just another social networking site, My-Plant.org also provides integrations and links into other sites, tools and repositories of information both within iPlant and across the community as a whole. This includes connecting users to the iPlant Discovery Environment, the NCBI Taxonomic Database, the Tree of Life web project, TreeBASE, and the Encyclopedia of Life. My-Plant.org is currently under development and welcomes feedback from the community.

Key features include:

Social Networking

• Multiple administrative levels within the site
• Enhanced user profile pages
• User communication and collaboration capabilities
• Tracking of user contributions and ranking capabilities

Data Integration

• Mechanisms to bring external information into relevant clades through published web services
• Provide configurable web services (currently provide RSS feeds)
• Geospatial tagging of data in the network

Network Analytics

• Network viewers such as hyperbolic view to browse the site by species, traits or other mechanism
• Tagging of data within the network

Video

Click here to watch a short [2:38] video about My-Plant.

Why Drupal

We evaluated a few different technologies for implementing My-Plant. The two main contenders were DASE and Drupal.

DASE and DRUPAL were as different as the approach we would need to take meet our goals. DASE approaches this more from the data-centric point of view; collect data, images, articles into an online archive. We would then build social networking features on top of that. The alternative is a more user-centric approach: build an online community, social network and portal that will allow users to share their data, images, articles, and research with each other. The “data assembly” grows organically out of this network through users tagging and categorizing content as appropriate.

We elected to use Drupal and take the more user-centric approach to developing My-Plant. Using Drupal as the framework provided additional advantages as well as challenges. Drupal has a rich user community and library of open-source, community supported modules. Other scientific portals are using the Drupal and there is a growing library of Drupal modules dedicated to scientific websites and applications. [One example: LifeDesks.org] The growing interest of the scientific community in using Drupal as a platform give us the opportunity to make the modules we developed available for use in other scientific portals.

Drupal Modules

Modules Developed
Clade
Clade Gallery
Clade Files
MyPlant Blocks
Tree Groups

The primary module developed for My-Plant was the Clade module. Named after the term from phylogenetics, it is the clade module that gives the My-Plant structure its hierarchical structure. Developing this hierarchical network was one of the primary requirements and a feature that our search did not turn up in any other implementation of a group-structured social network.
Typically, interest groups in social networks have a flat, disconnected structure. Each group exists completely separate from the next: postings, events, memberships, etc., from one group don’t apply to other groups. However, for My-Plant we needed a group structure that would allow data from groups to easily and automatically flow between groups according to the hierarchical structure. For example, consider three groups: Angiosperms, Monocots and Eudicots. These three groups are all within the clade Angiosperms. So users who are interested in joining a group dedicated generally to all Angiosperms could join the Angiosperms group. Postings from the Monocots and Eudicots groups would also apply to Angiosperms. As a result, the postings would “bubble” up the tree# to groups higher up in the hierarchy. Alternatively, Monocots and Eudicots are related to each other a siblings in the hierarchy: postings in Monocots would likely have little to do with Eudicots. These two groups would not have message bubbling between them.
All other modules were developed to provide other functionality as required.

Drupal Modules Used*
Organic groups
Node Hierarchy
Taxonomy
Shibboleth Authentication
Views
GMap
Advanced Profile Kit

*List of Modules used for core functionality - Please find a complete list at the bottom of the post

Integration with other Toolkits

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - http://thejit.org/
We have used jit toolkit to provide a visual tree structure of the groups(clades) which users can navigate to and join in.

The My-Plant.org Team

The University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Matthew Hanlon
Praveen Nuthulapati
Stephen Mock
Michael B. Gonzales

Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Brent Mishler
Susan Tremblay
Thomas Madsen

University of Florida
Pam Soltis
Doug Soltis
Lucas Majure
Adam Payton

Academy of Natural Sciences
Rick McCourt

University of Washington
Richard Olmstead

Arizona State University
Martin Wojciechowski

University of Arizona
Nirav Merchant

Complete list of modules used

AddThis
Advanced help
Aggregator
Avatar Crop
Administration menu
Advanced Profile Kit
Automatic Nodetitles
Block
CKEditor
Comment
Content
Database logging
Frequently Asked Questions
Forum
Facebook-style Statuses
Filter
GMap
GMap Macro Builder
getID3()
GMap Location
Google Analytics
ImageAPI
ImageCache UI
Invite
ImageCache
IMCE
jQuery Update
jQuery UI
Location
Locale
Menu
Messaging
Node Hierarchy
No Request New Pass
Node
Node Hierarchy Views Embed
Notifications
Content Notifications
Organic groups access control
Organic Groups Notifications
Organic groups user roles
Organic groups
OG forum
Organic groups panels.
Panels
Panel nodes
Pathauto
Profile
Page manager
Mini panels
Path
Private messages
Services
Statistics
System
Search
Shibboleth authentication
Syslog
Teaser Thumbnail
Trigger
Taxonomy
Url alter
UR-API
UR-UI
User Locations
Update status
User
UR-Search
Views exporter
Views
Views UI
Webform