
Senckenberg Research Institute and Museum, Frankfurt	Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem

Abstracts

TDWG 2000: Digitising Biological Collections
Taxonomic Databases Working Group, 16th Annual Meeting
Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, November 10-12, 2000

Lothar Menner & Michael Türkay*

SeSam - a web-based collection management system

* Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

[Presentation]

The collection management system SeSam is aimed at collecting, storing and retrieving data from collections of animals and plants, both recent and fossil, in a single data base and offering the curator a number of management tools. The data of these different subjects can presently be stored in one common data array. Biosystematic, geographic, marine zoogeographic and stratigraphic information is stored in a hierarchical structure. For each collection additional fields can be defined in order to make the database flexible for differing needs.

Version III of the collection management system SeSam is now being implemented as a real web application. SeSam can be started with a browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator. No installation of a client-software is thus necessary. SeSam works with the relational Microsoft SQL Server as data base management system. All functions in the collection management system are available through the web interface. Data collection is controlled by user friendly screens. Data retrieval can be done with various queries. The output of the retrieved items can be sent to a sequential file for further use with standard report programs.

Five user groups offer different data access rights to ensure maximum data security. The web based version III of SeSam is in testing now.

TDWG | Participants | Presentations | Senckenberg Museum | BGBM Biodiversity Informatics

This meeting was co-sponsored by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA)