The Introduction of the Animal Information Management System

Qiao Hui-Jie and Ji Li-Qiang, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

This paper will introduce a biodiversity information management system which has been used for about one year in China. It is named as Animal Information Management System(AIMS). The base info will be introduced at first. The next part will introduce the structure of the system. A conclusion and discussion is the last part.

The number of species in China which include “local” species (species that grow naturally in the country) and “foreign” species (species that have been brought in from various parts of the world) is huge. And the number is growing every year. During the past decade, several new local species have been identified and there has also been a rapid growth in the number of foreign species. A lot of species in danger need to be conserved. Many pests about plant protection or agriculture need to be monitored. And the hotspots should be attention. All of there make it essential for their biodiversity to be conserved. Several measures for biodiversity conservation have been suggested by researchers and scientists in the area of environmental sciences. These measures include identification of species, monitoring the status of endangered species and monitoring the climatic conditions of various geographic locations.

Biodiversity Database:

Because of the characteristic of the biodiversity data, the traditional relational database systems may not be the best choice for biodiversity database systems. Some standards, Darwin-Core ABCD for instance, use Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) to describe the data about taxa or biodiversity. In AIMS, the main data are stored in a relational database( Microsoft SQL Server 2000), and the format of the data which are transferred in this system is in XML.

The biodiversity data in AIMS can be classed into four major groups: the taxonomic data, the geographic data, the bibliographic data and the experts data.

The solutions to share the data

There are two ways – thin client and smart client - to share the data in the Biodiversity Database.
The thin client is made by Microsoft Active Server Page and the smart client is programmed by Borland Delphi and Microsoft .Net Framework. The introduction about the clients can be found in this paper.


Keywords : Key words: Biodiversity, Taxology, Information System