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NU Taxon Update_Sept 2005

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Napier Update May-Sept 2005

  • Explored possibility of auto-generating forms from xml through XForms technology
    • Concluded that concrete XForms implementations not quite up to the job yet (June 2005)
    • XForms works by taking a schema plus a corresponding xml 'instance' file to generate a forms document. The implementations so far (formsplayer, chiba, novell xforms) have trouble with 'switch' and 'optional' elements in a schema - tcs contains both. Revisions to XForms 1.1 will solve some of these difficulties (ability to insert optional elements into xml instance) if this technology is pursued in the future.

  • Produced TCS Data Sets for multiple taxonomy visualisation
    • Kopersky Moss (14 * 10-10,000 taxa & species)
    • MANIS (15 * 1,000-9,000 taxa & species)
    • ITIS (7 * 200,000-250,000 taxa)
    • ITIS TCS XML file huge for seven entire hierarchies - 650MB
      • Unwieldy for large data sets?
      • Takes 2.5 minutes to read in and parse (slightly faster with StAX v SAX parser) and uses 350MB+ memory
      • Two pass parsing uses less memory but 4 minutes to parse

  • Additions/Refinements to visualisation
    • Ability to find uniquely named taxa out of a set of classifications
    • Speeded up large tree comparisons - 2.5s to find classification structural changes
    • Simple hash functions to reference names across classifications reduce memory footprint for sparser datasets without detriment to speed
    • Added panel for visually comparing one particular name of interest across classifications
    • add more later

  • Attended TDWG 2005 meeting in St Petersburg



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This particular version was published on 21-Oct-2005 12:59:19 PDT by NAPIER.graham.