CDM DataPortal
If you came to this page looking only for our feature rich taxonomy browser and widget 'cdm_taxontree' you can skip some paragraphs below in order to jump right to this module.
The module 'cdm_dataportal' is an biodiversity informatics application for web publication of most data relevant for this domain of information. It is in fact a set of four modules 'cdm_api', 'cdm_portal', 'cdm_taxontree' and 'cdm_mediauri'. Together they enable Drupal to search, browse and display the biodiversity data hosted by a CDM (Common Data Model, see below) driven data store. The resulting pages of this "DataPortal" partially mimic the layout of common taxonomic books.
The 'cdm_dataportal' module set is being developed by the Botanic Garden & Botanical Museum Berlin for the European joint project EDIT (European Distributed Institute for Taxonomy). One of the major aims of EDIT is to develop a platform for biological taxonomists, covering most biodiversity related data realms. This platform for cybertaxonomy is in fact a set of distinct tools embedded into a service driven architecture. The very core of the platform is the so called Common Data Model (CDM) which integrates all relevant quasi data standards. A CDM library is being developed to provide service layers to access and modify the data stored in CDM stores. The CDM library also provides the REST service application to which the "DataPortal" connects in order to fetch data from the CDM store.
cdm_api:
This library contains functions for connecting to and fetching data from CDM web services. The 'cdm_api' retrieves objects from a CDM store as JSON serialisations and converts them into php objects. Some general purpose functions which help processing CDM objects are also contained.
'cdm_dataportal':
Requests CDM web services using the 'cdm_api'. The CDM store can be searched for scientific and common taxon names (i.e. name of a species or genus). For each species a page can be rendered showing information on the synonyms, the history of synonymy, related media objects, descriptions, references, geo locations and time of occurrences (observations and collection events) and more.
'cdm_taxontree':
This is one of the essential modules for building up the CDM Data Portal. It is an AHAH driven browser for taxonomic trees stored in the CDM store. Of course it can however also be used for general Drupal taxonomies. Since the taxonomic trees in biology can be quite vast and since the names of taxa are often lengthy space consuming strings, some features have been implemented into 'cdm_taxontree' easing the pain when working with these taxonomies.
The tree can be embedded into a set of div tags called the 'magicbox'. When the mouse pointer enters the tree box, the tree will expand horizontally, thus overlapping other content. Taxon names now are fully visible without annoying horizontal scrolling. Once the mouse leaves the area of the tree the box shrinks again. This feature is useful if node titles are quite long or if the tree is nested deeply.
The tree can offer buttons to add a node to a set of filters which can then be applied to the tree to limit the visible sub trees to the set of sub trees chosen as filter set. Three different compact modes are available.
Furthermore is the 'cdm_taxontree' module capable of being used as widget for selecting one ore multiple nodes of a taxonomy.
'cdm_mediauri':
Allows to convert URIs pointing to media objects of a specific mime-type, quality level etc. into other URIs linking to other quality levels, mime types. Conversion is performed by using regex replace patterns; whereas the resulting URI can be surrounded by code snippets allowing embedding the URI into object/embed tags.
The module will be made available soon.
