Project Plan and Progress

The project has now been in development for four years, and has made thirteen quarterly releases of software. Each release is designed to implement a significant feature of the software. The two exemplar sites are in use by the content teams, and content is being added on a regular basis.

The first year was spent gathering requirements and producing mock-ups of the project websites based upon ideas gathered from the content teams. We produced two static websites with example data for the genus Arum for the Araceae site, and the genus Acherontia for the Sphingidae website.

Subsequent releases involved a switch over to a database-driven site, enhanced functionality including searching, browsing, and editing the data, adding comments to taxon pages, uploading images, and an LSID resolution service for each website (see here).

We also uploaded taxon pages for the Araceae genera, Arum, Philodendron, Anthurium, the African Araceae and others plus an interactive keys to the genera, Anthurium, Philodendron, Arum, and the African Araceae. For the Sphingidae we uploaded diagnostic information plus high quality adult and genitalia images for over 1,500 species.

A significant milestone was the completion of an entire re-write of the software to use the EDIT Project's Common Data Model as the data model for the application and refactoring the persistence and service layers to use the EDIT CDM Java Library.

Subsequently we enhanced the editing functionality allowing registered users with the correct privileges to add new species pages, add new people, author teams, references, collections, specimens, type data, terms and add text data, distribution records and upload images, keys and phylogenetic trees. We've also switched to using the EDIT Map REST Service to generate the distribution maps in the species pages, and have integrated the Djatoka Jpeg 2000 Image server into CATE, processing uploaded images and serving them dynamically.

CATE is now no longer under active development.