Other funding and support
The Paleobiology Database owes its existence to an international team of dedicated member data contributors and curators. Nearly 10 continuous person-years have gone into data entry and editing, resulting in the single largest paleontological knowledgebase yet created. Much of this work has been supported by individuals working on their own or with individual institutional support. Others have had specific scientific projects funded by national funding agencies.
The Paleobiology Database is primarily supported by NSF EAR Geoinformatics grant 0949416, which has provided for the development of the database and website since 2010.
Ongoing database-related development is also supported directly by several NSF grants.
Although the databasing of scientific knowledge is well underway in a number of different associations, the resulting sources are fragmented. Bioscience and geoscience databases are usually created by individual research communities to suit their individual needs. As a result, it can be difficult for researchers and other users to compare data from different sources. Two of the current NSF grants funding the PBDB, listed below as ePANDDA and ELC, constitute similar efforts to address this problem by creating APIs and data standards to make the PBDB interoperable with other existing databases.
This project focuses on interactions between the PBDB and specimen-based databases, including iDigBio/iDigPaleo and individual museum collections.
The ePANDDA project will develop an application programming interface (API) to permit the exchange of data between three large, established, and well-supported databases: the Paleobiology Database, whose data are drawn from publications, and iDigBio and iDigPaleo, whose data are based on museum-held specimens. The new API, by enabling each of these databases to query the other two and synthesize the results, will allow data from all the included sources to be seamlessly accessed by users of any of them. For example, a paleontologist using the PBDB interface will be able to search a taxonomic name and receive not only a list of collection sites, but also a list of museum-held fossil and modern specimens of that taxon.
This project focuses on interactions between the PBDB and geography/environment-based databases, such as Neotoma and Macrostrat.
It will create a cyberinfrastructure for paleobiological sciences and a data exchange standard to facilitate data exchange between existing and future biological and geoscience databases. The existing databases being included in the project are the PBDB, Neotoma, Macrostrat, MioMap, the Mexican Quaternary Mammals Database, the South American Extinctions Database, and the regional nonmarine ostracode databases DAOD, NANODe, and NODE. An API and web services that serve as an interface between PBDB, Neotoma, and Macrostrat will be built, and the other databases listed will be incorporated into Neotoma by harmonizing their data structures. Extending the DarwinCore data exchange format to deal with paleobiological data and establishing a system of unique digital object identifiers (DOIs) for the collections and other objects in these databases will help to create a framework for the future sharing of data between biological and paleobiological databases.
Research experience for undergraduates in paleontology and data science, thanks to the public availability of the PBDB, is theoretically available to anyone at any school. However, making the interface easier to use and making lesson plans available will improve the usability of the database. This grant permits us to develop a new and more user-friendly interface for the PBDB and a library of lesson plans for undergraduate paleontology classes.
The research activities being designed as part of this project are being tested at several two-year and four-year colleges to assess their usefulness across a range of student populations and teaching modes, including both traditional classroom and distance learning. All of the lesson plans and tutorials are available on the Resources page.