Visual comparison and exploration of natural history collections

Graham, Martin; Kennedy, Jessie; Downey, Laura

Abstract

Natural history museum collections contain a wealth of specimen level data that is now opening up for digital access. However, current interfaces to access and manipulate this data are standard text-based query mechanisms, giving no leeway for exploratory investigation of the collections. By adapting previous work on multiple taxonomies we allow visual comparison of related museum collections to discover areas of overlap, naming errors, and unique sections of a collection, indicating areas of specialisation for individual collections and the complementarities of the set formed by the collections as a whole.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces - AVI '06
• Start Date: May 23, 2006
• End Date: May 26, 2006
• Publication Date: 2006
• Deposit Date: Oct 26, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 26, 2009
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 310-313
• Book Title: Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) 2006, Proceedings of the International Working Conference
• ISBN: 1595933530
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1133265.1133329
• Keywords: Natural history; Collections; Mutiple taxonomies; Digitisation; Visual comparison; Taxonomic comparison; Reassessment of collections
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/3029
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1133265.1133329
• Contract Date: Oct 26, 2009