Picture: Rhododendrons Credit: Amit Kurien

Credit: ATREE

Picture: Giant woodspider Credit:Gladwin

This is a page for discussion and setting priorities for the evolution of the portal. Features requested will be discussed, scoped and prioritized. From this, features for future releases and time lines for subsequent releases will be detailed.

Even as we built the basic platform, a set of desirable and required features have been expressed. These are listed below. We need to add other features to this list if necessary, prioritize from this list, and create a roadmap with time lines for the next release.

1. Automatic online layer creation: Users should be able to create a layer with existing data, or create a new layer, by specifying a layer schema and populating it with data.

2. Export spatial and non-spatial data: Users should be able to export spatial and non-spatial data from the portal. The data should be exported in a variety of supported formats. The export and download of layers and data should be governed by the access privileges and the licensing regimes for the layer and data.

3. Charting module: The charting module should provide attractive charts and visualization of the data and tables in each layer. This should be a plug-in and should be interactive.

4. Map Composition Utility: It may be useful to have a map composition module, where the different layers available on the portal can be composed into a map and the map can be printed with scale and legend as a pdf, a svg or some other portable format. There is a mature and well-developed map publishing module called cartoweb working on the MapServer. Fortunately for us, our platform is built on MapServer and PostGIS database, which integrate well with cartoweb, map composition module.

5. Analysis module: There are many open source modules for the analysis of spatial data. Surface interpolations, kriging algorithms, spatial auto-correlations functions, buffering, and map algebra are available as open source libraries and modules. In addition there are many open source modules in the ecological domain, like niche modeling and home range analysis that could enhance the utility and functionality of the portal. We may need to prioritize and integrate these modules on the portal so that citizens, amateurs and scientists can analyse spatial data on the portal.

6. Support for Languages: The platform has been built with internationalization support. All the components that have been used support the Unicode i18n standards. Content needs to be created in Indian languages, either by translation of content already available on the portal, or creating content afresh, or by a combination of the two. We need to ensure that we do not face problems in synchronising content in different languages.

7. Participation and aggregation enhancements: We need to strengthen participation. The participation workflow is still clunky. We could enhance participation by making the user interfaces easy for participation and in fact making it very easy for users to upload data. Also, we need strengthen methods to validate and aggregate the data. Along with this there will have to be a reaching out by road shows and exposures to groups and communities that could help in enriching participation.

8. Support for display of raster data: Many spatial data sets are raster. We currently do not have raster support. LANDSAT imagery of the whole world is now freely available on the Internet. Many studies produce raster maps. We could add raster data support to the portal.

9. WMS servers and APIs: A public site like the India Biodiversity Portal should allow for easy sharing of data and information available on the portal. We could work on exposing APIs and serving maps directly for other servers around the world to access our data directly and pragmatically, through interfaces.

10. Support of Species pages: Species-referencing. All biodiversity informatics is about the occurrence and distribution of species in the world. Such information needs two frames of reference. Geo-referenced data and species referenced information. The portal achieves spatial referencing and accepts onlygeo -referenced data. It would be useful to build the species referencing components. Steps have been taken in this direction, where we have the resource tables, one for plants and one for birds. These are layer or map independent and can be used by any map to get more information about species. We could strengthen this and link to other species focused sites like GBIF, EOL Tree of life, etc.