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About OZCAM

OZCAM stands for the Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums. The aim of OZCAM is to provide an online distributed query network to faunal collections in Australian museums. OZCAM is an initiative of the Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC), a body formed from representatives of every Australian museum that holds significant faunal collections. Development of OZCAM has been funded through contributions by participating institutions and the Australian Government, through the Department of the Environment and Heritage.

The site you are visiting provides a "proof of concept" that it is possible to provide access to datasets around Australia via a single portal. Currently, queries can be made on five groups of animals: mammals, reptiles and amphibians, fishes, dung beetles and molluscs. An extensive query screen allows the user to query by taxon name, by place, by time or by a combination of these. The user can also nominate which museums are to be queried. Data returned from sites around Australia can be displayed either as dots on a map or as a list. From either of these displays it is possible to mine the data further and view the raw dataset for any single specimen.

The Significance of OZCAM

Museums hold signficant repositories of data about the biodiversity of Australian fauna. However, the data each institution holds is limited by collecting practices - that is, not all museums collect in the same place at the same time. In order to achieve a picture of the fauna of the whole of Australia, as represented in museum collections, the data from all the museums must be linked. This is what OZCAM does.

The Australian Virtual Herbarium

OZCAM has been designed to parallel the Australian Virtual Herbarium, a site where queries can be made about the flora of Australia. In the future it may be possible to link the two distributed networks to provide a portal for querying flora and fauna simultaneously.

Nuts and bolts (or wires)

This site is designed to demonstrate a "proof of concept" of the concept that faunal collections around Australia can be queried simultaneously on a distributed network via a single portal. The site is powered by software from KE Software and hosted on a server run by Museum Victoria. Each institution holds data on its own server in whatever form the institution chooses. OZCAM has not imposed a standard database but has simply requested data in a specific number of fields. Different museums have chosen different modes of delivery of their data: some have published datasets outside their network's firewall; others allow direct access to the datasets through their security systems. Communication between the distributed datasets and the central portal is achieved by using wrapper software developed by AMOL and Museum Victoria, to interpret queries and responses. An XML schema gives structure to the datasets.

Where to from here?

OZCAM can be extended in many ways. Possibilities include:

• Addition of type specimens around Australia. Inclusion of vertebrate and molluscan types will tie into the GBIF initiative.
• Addition of more groups to the distributed datasets. There are many choices: birds, butterflies and plenty of invertebrate groups.
• Development of a publicly accessible section of OZCAM. Such a site would probably work in the same way as the password protected site but impose some limitations on accessibility of the raw data.

Taxa Covered

Taxa that are covered, by institution, in the current release are:

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OZCAM is an initiative of the Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections (CHAFC)

Australia's Fauna is hosted by Museum Victoria
Last updated 2007-06-20