Richard White This is my unofficial home page at www.rjwhite.tk. I also have an official University home page (which is also available in Welsh - Tudalen yn Gymraeg). You can email me (in English) at the address given in the official page. Welcome to my World-wide Web home page. Click on the following topics for more information: Links on this page Scientific interests Areas of expertise Publications About the author Where I work Other activities Other useful links Online notes Computer notes Computer security Computer security

Delivering Species Biodiversity Information on the Web

My bookmarks My web sites My computer programs

Areas of expertise Software development for biological applications, databases, World-wide Web Biodiversity computing Most of my research activities revolve around the application of database, Web and programming techniques to enhance the usefulness of species diversity databases. I am particularly interested in methods for database linking, which relate to many of the projects listed above.

About the author

I used to work in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, UK, and still have the status of a Visiting Researcher there. You can see from this picture of Southampton Civic Centre, taken by a webcam run by the BBC, that Southampton can be quite a dangerous place to live and work.

Here is my staff page which duplicates some of the information on this page.

Scientific interests:

• Design, organisation and implementation of species diversity databases
• Assembling large collaborative databases using data transfer and linking techniques
• Making database systems with automated taxonomic indexing widely available as the core of biological information services
• Algorithms and software to make shape and pattern measurements of biological images to produce data suitable for statistical and multivariate analysis.

I am a Director of ILDIS, working closely with its Coordinating Centre, and I am responsible for providing web access to the ILDIS World Database of Legumes through the LegumeWeb gateway. I am also Chairman of the Technical Subgroup (responsible to the Project Management Team) of the Species 2000 project to index all the world's species on the World-wide Web. I am a member of the Steering Committee of the European Register of Marine Species project, and Chairman of the Database Design Committee. I am also a member of the Database Design Group of the BioCISE project to provide an information service on European biological collections.

I live near the edge of the New Forest in a small town called Fordingbridge.
Relatives.

Publications

• Allkin, R. & White, R.J. XDF: A language for the definition and exchange of biological data sets, Royal Botanic Garden, Kew.
• Allkin, R., White, R.J. and Winfield, P.J. Handling the structure of biological data. Mathematics and Computer Modelling 16, 1992, 1-9.
• Berendsohn, W.G., Anagnostopoulos, A., Hagedorn, G., Jakupovic, J., Nimis, P.L., Valdés, B., Güntsch, A., Pankhurst, R.J. & White, R.J. A comprehensive reference model for biological collections and surveys. Taxon 48, 1999, 511-562. [electronic version: www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/biodivinf/docs/CollectionModel/]
• Berendsohn, W.G., Costello, M.J., Emblow, C., Güntsch, A., Hahn, A., Koenemann, J., Thomas, C., Thomson, N. & White, R.J. Concepts for a European portal to biological collections. In: Berendsohn, W.G., ed. Resource Identification for a Biological Collection Information Service in Europe (BioCISE), Berlin: Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, 2000, 76pp.
• Bisby, F.A., Zarucchi, J.L., Schrire, B.D., Roskov, Y.R. & White, R.J. ILDIS World Database of Legumes, edition 5. Reading: ILDIS, 2000. [Electronic publication available on the Internet (LegumeWeb service at www.ildis.org) and on disc (LegumeDisc service).]
• Costello, M., Emblow, C. & White, R.J. European Register of Marine Species, in press, 2001.
• Embury, S.M., Jones, A.C., Sutherland, I., Gray, W.A., White, R.J., Robinson, J.S., Bisby, F.A. & Brandt, S.M. Conflict Detection for Integration of Taxonomic Data Sources. In: Z.M. Özsoyoglu, G. Özsoyoglu & W.-C. Hou, eds. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, IEEE Computer Society Press, Cleveland Ohio USA, 1999, 204-213.
• Jones, A.C., Xu, X., Pittas, N., Gray, W.A., Fiddian, N.J., White, R.J., Robinson, J.S., Bisby, F.A., & Brandt, S.M. SPICE: A flexible architecture for integrating autonomous databases to comprise a distributed catalogue of life. Submitted, 2000.
• Maxted, N., White, R.J. and Allkin, R. The automatic synthesis of descriptive data using the taxonomic hierarchy. Taxon 42, 1993, 51-62.
• Shimura, J., Ichiyanagi, Y., Hollis, S., White, R.J. & Bisby, F.A. A linked rhizobia and plant host information system (RAPHIS) on the World-wide Web. Microbiol. Cult. Coll. 14, 1998, 23-32.
• Southon, I.W., Bisby, F.A., Buckingham, J., Harborne, J.B., Zarucchi, J.L., Polhill, R.M., Adams, B.R., Lock, J.M., White, R.J., Bowes, I., Hollis, S. and Heald, J. Phytochemical Dictionary of the Leguminosae. London: Chapman & Hall (ISBN 0 412 39770 6), 1994, 1580pp.
• Sutherland, I., Embury, S.M., Gray, W.A., Jones, A.C., Bisby, F.A., Brandt, S.M., Robinson, J.S. & White, R.J. Knowledge Integrity Testing for the Integration of Taxonomic Databases. In: D. Gilbert, ed. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Constraints in Bioinformatics/Biocomputing, Pisa, Italy, 1998.
• Sutherland, I., Robinson, J.S., Brandt, S.M., Jones, A.C., Embury, S.M., Gray, W.A., White, R.J. & Bisby, F.A. Assisting the Integration of Taxonomic Data: The LITCHI Toolkit. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2000), IEEE Computer Society Press, in press, 2000.
• White, R.J. and Allkin, R. A language for the definition and exchange of biological data sets. Mathematics and Computer Modelling 16, 1992, 199-223.
• White, R.J. and Allkin, R. A strategy for the evolution of database designs. In: F.A. Bisby, G.F. Russell and R.J. Pankhurst, eds. Designs for a Global Plant Species Information System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 284-303.
• White, R.J., Allkin, R. and Winfield, P.J. Systematic databases: the Baobab design and the Alice system. In: R. Fortuner, ed. Advances in Computer Methods for Systematic Biology: Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Computer Vision, chapter 19. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 297-311.

Other output

• White, R.J., Bisby, F.A., Polhill, R.M., Zarucchi, J.L., Adams, B.R. & Hollis, S. ILDIS LegumeWeb (ILDIS World Database of Legumes) , 1997 - 2000. [On-line database: www.ildis.org/LegumeWeb]
• White, R.J. European Register of Marine Species, 1998 - 2000. [On-line database: www.erms.biol.soton.ac.uk]
• Arbo software package
• Web sites

Other activities

Recent international conferences at which I have presented papers:

• Strategies in Bioinformatics: A European Perspective, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, September 26, 27 and 28, 1994 (Proceedings)
• Disseminating Biodiversity Information, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 1996
• International Joint Workshop for Studies on Biodiversity, Tsukuba, Japan, July 1999
• XIV International Congress of Botany, St Louis, USA, August 1999

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Copyright © 2004 by Dr Richard J. White, School of Computer Science, Cardiff University. All rights reserved.

Although permanently out-of-date, this page was designed and prepared by Richard White and last edited on 19 September 2004. It resides on a server run by PlusNet plc. Thanks to Dot TK for the domain name. Any views expressed by me in these pages are entirely accidental and not necessarily those of anyone else.