Uma Biblioteca Digital Georreferenciada para Dados Ecológicos Evandrino G. Barros, Ligiane A. Souza, Ricardo G. Cota, Karla A. V. Borges, Alberto H. F. Laender, Marcos André Gonçalves, and Francisco A. R. Barbosa   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Bibliotecas Digitais e Similaridade/Digital Libraries and Similarity Abstract This paper describes BDiG-PELD, a digital library for integrating ecological data produced by a Brazilian biodiversity research network. The BDiG-PELD architecture uses open interoperability standards and decentralized input interfaces for handling heterogeneous data from non-structured sources. These data are published in local EML (Ecological Metadata Language) metadata repositories and then harvested for inclusion in the BDiG-PELD central repository. From this repository, search and browsing services supporting georeferencing facilities are provided. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, a BDiG-PELD prototype was constructed using data from one of the research network sites. An experimental evaluation, with real users, focusing on usability and data quality aspects was conducted and its results are analyzed and discussed. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery