Governmental institutions, academic research projects as well as breeding programs of beekeeping associations inevitable gather data about bees and beekeepers. Unfortunately these databases become data islands and the information is of limited value for the beekeeping community as a whole.
beeXML is intended to be the answer to this problem.
The project is not about creating a central database. Rather, XML is a self-describing data format that can allow the exchange of data.
In order to create an XML standard, it is necessary to agree on what data is collected on a particular topic. The self-describing structure makes the exchange much more flexible than it would be with rigid table definitions.
In addition, there are countless development environments for ready-made software libraries to read and write XML.
Once we have a standard for a particular subject matter, the existing databases can be provided with XML interfaces.
This in turn would later allow a meta database, where it will be possible to query all connected databases via a common interface.
First, our task is to take an inventory as many existing databases as possible ( see Other Projects and Databases). Then ask the operators of the databases for their table definitions. This will allow use to generalize the similarities to an XML standard.
There are different data domains:
- colonies / beekeepers / operations / hive tracking systems
- biodiversity of bees and breeding lines - (for FAO DAD-IS database as well as the Apimondia license)
- bee diseases / pathogens / strains / treatments
- environmental data / contaminants and residues bee products
- modeling data as well as calibration data (MUST-B)
- data on authenticity of bee products (NMR method etc.)
- market data for bee products (prices, trade flows)
Stay tuned and contact us to contribute.
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