Want to Explore Marine Food Webs in the Gulf of Mexico? Visit GoMexSI

Ever wondered what happens beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico? Curious what a king mackerel (Scomberomorus cavalla) eats?  GoMexSI might help you find what you’re looking for.

GoMexSI (Gulf of Mexico Species Interactions) uses GloBI web services to provide the ability to explore marine predator-prey relationships in the Gulf of Mexico. GoMexSI offers three web tools for learning about trophic interactions in the Gulf of Mexico:

Taxonomic query for king mackerel (Scomberomorus cavalla) provides a diet breakdown, a list of interaction observations, and a link to download raw CSV data.

1) a taxonomic query tool that lists species-interaction observations with information, 2) a spatial query tool for finding species-interaction observations within a specific geographic area, and 3) a food-web explorer tool that helps to navigate visually through a food web.

Food-web explorer tool: species of interest in blue, predators in red, prey in green. You can click on predator or prey items to further explore the food web.

GoMexSI not only provides a valuable educational and research tool to study the food webs in the Gulf of Mexico, but also gives a great example of how GloBI web services can be used to recycle, repurpose, and liberate existing species-interaction datasets in our educational and scientific communities. The GoMexSI 1.0-beta version was released to the general public on September 3, 2013.

The GoMexSI website is developed by Reed Hewett and Michael Casavecchia under the guidance of James Simons of Texas A&M Corpus Christi and Jorrit Poelen (GloBI developer and author of this post). To learn more about the many other people and institutions that helped to get GoMexSI where it is today, visit http://gomexsi.tamucc.edu.

The continued success of GloBI and GoMexSI depends on data contributions of ecologist around the world. References to contributed datasets can be found at http://globalbioticinteractions.org/references.html . If you’d like to share your species-interaction dataset, please open an issue at http://github.com/jhpoelen/eol-globi-data or send a message using http://gomexsi.tamucc.edu/feedback/.

Sharing Ideas on GloBI Software and Data Models in Dolores Park, San Francisco

Yesterday (Sunday, March 3), Robert Reiz, Chris Mungall, and I got together in Dolores Park, San Francisco, to talk about software architecture, deployment, and data models while enjoying a windy but sunny winter day. Our discussions were really fun, and I wanted to share some of the sketches we made with y’all. Doesn’t a good idea always start with a bunch of drawings on the back of a napkin?

For those tech-savvy people out there, we’ve created some open-source repositories to host our software and datasets: eol-globi-data for normalizing, enriching, and importing species-interaction datasets; eol-globi-rest for implementing an API that is easy to embed in web pages; eol-globi-service for hosting the normalized datasets; and eol-globi-web, a Ruby on Rails web app that serves as an example of how to use the EOL-GloBI normalized species-interaction datasets and services. If you have any feedback or have the urge to contribute datasets or coding skills, don’t hesitate to contact me.

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