T188 Geological and Paleobiological Collections: Best Practices for Preservation, Access, and Use in a Changing World (Posters)

Tuesday, 2 November 2010
8:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Hall D

PALEOASYS: A WEB-BASED APPLICATION FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION TRACKING, RESEARCHING, AND BIDIRECTIONAL SHARING OF PALEOBIOLOGICAL AND GEOLOGICAL DATA

Paper number: T188-5
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Authors

Abstract

Today, scientists and the general public want easy access to the geological and paleontological data via the platform of their choice, to address questions at a resolution previously unavailable, and the ability to post information to social media. Paleoasys provides this ability. Paleoasys is a content management system website application for paleontological research activities and associated geological data, driven by a relational DBMS. It integrates a virtually limitless array of fields such as: collecting activities, laboratory analyses, curatorial tasks, locality details, stratigraphy, age, geology and sedimentology, specimen details and measurements, GIS, research analyses, and multimedia into a single one-touch platform. Statistics, reports, and charts may be modified quickly and easily, and generated for numerous permutations or subsets of the data.

Paleoasys is offered as a Software as a Service, which provides and maintains the software and hardware on the server side, thus reducing costs and time associated with maintenance of the infrastructure. Users can access it via browser. It is compatible with IE6+, Chrome 2+, Firefox 3+, Safari 4+ and Opera 9+. It is also accessible via web services, GIS software, and database tools. In summary, Paleoasys uniquely combines the ability to track research and collecting activities through a variety of multimedia, run quantitative analyses on subsets of the data, generate easily-modified reports with the user-friendly community features, and share information via social media, the web, and computer to computer communications (web services). Paleoasys is ideal for use in field- and collections-based research collaborations that span several basins, countries, or continents.