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28th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, February 21-23, 2003
Abstracts
Spatial and Temporal Searching of Desert Tortoise Information
Richard Inman, Melissa Brenneman, and Jill S. Heaton, PhD
The Redlands Institute, University of Redlands 1200 E. Colton Ave., Duke Hall, Redlands,
CA 92373
The Mojave desert tortoise was first studied in detail by Woodbury and Hardy (1948), however, the majority of the existing data and related information was collected within the past 30 years, representing a large cumulative investment by agencies, institutions, and individuals. These data exist today in a wide variety of forms and media, and much of this information is not generally accessible, limiting the consensus building among scientists, policy makers, and managers. To date, there has been no systematic inventory, consistent descriptive cataloging, or comparative assessment of these data, outside of traditional annotated bibliographies. The Redlands Institute is undertaking such an effort, and is developing an integrated and innovative environment for tracking and searching a wide variety of information sources, called SPINE. Using the Redlands Institute's "Cross-Media Database (XMDB)™" as a platform, the SPINE system consists of desert tortoise related data and resources, a search platform, and an interface to access and search for information. Such data and information can include: scientific investigations, tabular and statistical databases, photographs, GIS data, multi-media, websites, people, organizations, events and other types. Common search techniques such as simple keyword or full-text searching are included, and in addition, other methods such as spatial and temporal searching and topical hierarchies are being incorporated. More sophisticated search and discovery techniques, such as collaborative filtering or importance ranking are also being developed. This paper will focus on basic keyword/topic search techniques in addition to the more advanced spatial and temporal search functionality.