Biodiversity Technologies conference

English Heritage Tour: Portland Castle

Part of a tour of locations owned or managed by English Heritage (part 1 of many): Portland Castle - built in the 1540s as one of the Device Forts to protect the natural harbour of Portland from the threat of invasion from the French and Spanish. The Castle has a squat design to minimise target area and curved walls to deflect incoming fire.

(Non original) cannons

View from the castle over harbour

Modify weight of field programmatically (Drupal 7)

The key to this are the two functions field_read_instance and  field_update_instance. This can also be used to modify any of the other available properties of the field instance (apart from the entity_type, field_name and bundle).

New open access data journal from Pensoft

Biodiversity Data Journal

Comaprison of IPTC, EoL DwC Media & Audubon Core

As part of the eMonocot and Scratchpads projects I have been doing some research to help us decide what metadata we will allow users to add to media by default. For images the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) standard is generally considered de facto. While it forms a good basis for the curation of metadata of biological images and videos, in itself it is inadequate. Two schemes for extending this basis are the EoL Media DarwinCore extension and the more comprehensive Audubon Core (a proposed TDWG standard).

In order to compare and contrast these three standards to aid in our decision making I created this spreadsheet which may be of use to others.