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Participants

Learn more about the Apiary Project's Principal Investigators, Team Members, and Advisory Group.

Principal Investigators



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Amanda Neill

Director of the Herbarium

Co-PI

Amanda is the Director of the BRIT-SMU-VDB Herbarium at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas and a Co-PI on the Apiary Project. Her primary role in Apiary is as a domain expert for herbarium specimen metadata and Darwin Core/Apiary metadata standards development, including the Annotations extension to be proposed. Her herbarium responsibilities include curation and management of the largest independent herbarium in the southern US, with over 1 million specimens; oversight of policies, procedures, staff, and budgeting; grant-writing; oversight of digitization projects; and planning the herbarium move to BRIT's new building in 2011. Her interests include collections management, biodiversity informatics, the flora of Texas, and the flora of the Neotropics. Amanda enjoys traveling, to anywhere at all.


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William Moen

Apiary Principal Investigator

Director of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK)

Associate Dean for Research, College of Information, University of North Texas

Bill has managed a number of large research and development projects, including two previous IMLS National Leadership Grants. His research focuses on metadata and its use for managing and discovering digital information. In the Apiary Project, Bill leads the overall management of the project, and attends to issues of metadata standards (Darwin Core) and XML representations of the specimen label information, including quality assessment of the label data (i.e., metadata) resulting from the workflow processes. Occasionally he has time to work in his garden and native-plants and wildscape-oriented yard.


Jason Best

Co-PI

Head of Biodiversity Informatics at BRIT

Jason is a primary creator of the Atrium Biodiversity Information System (http://www.atrium-biodiversity.org) developed at BRIT with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and continues to oversee its development and programming. He has experience training users of web-based applications, designing and testing user interfaces, and communicating biologists’ and collection managers’ requirements to programmers on his team. He leads the development and implementation of programming throughout the Apiary project and will direct the integration of interfaces into the workflow.


Team Members



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Melody McCotter

Research Assistant

Melody is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Information Science program in the College of Information at the University of North Texas and a Research Assistant on the Apiary Project. Her major research interests are digital imaging and image collection management, information accessibility, and information organization. She has contributed to the controlled vocabulary and metadata schema development efforts in the Apiary Project, particularly the creation of the Annotation Event extension to the Darwin Core, website and workflow development, and offers ideas and suggestions throughout the project. When not at work or school, Melody enjoys hiking, photography, and spending time with her yellow dog, Orbit.


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Hong Xu

Research Assistant

Hong is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Information Science program in the College of Information at the University of North Texas and a Research Assistant on the Apiary Project. Her major research interests are digital library,digital repository, metadata, research metadata and information organization. She has contributed to the controlled vocabulary and metadata schema development efforts in the Apiary Project, particularly the Generic Apiary schema and RDF. When not at work or school, Hong enjoys walking, cooking, and reading. Hong also likes to pet dogs, especially labs and golden retrievers.


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Anton Webber

Web Developer

Anton graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University in 1994 with a B.S. in Computer Science. Hired out of college to build a quality assurance team, Anton went on to lead software teams developing applications for retail products, web based services, as well as custom software applications for the museum industry. While his background has been mainly in Windows based technologies, Anton enjoys working with open source technologies such as PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux. His hobbies include programming, training for marathons, and spending time on the lake with his family.


Keri McNew

BRIT Projects Manager

Keri has been working to manage several research projects at BRIT. Through her work with the Andes to Amazon Biodiversity program, she helps to locate potential volunteers and interns to assist the team based in Peru. She will help the team locate volunteers that will begin to test the Apiary workflow. She also manages the daily BRIT expense reports regarding this project.


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Sean Murphy

Apiary Project Systems Administrator and Software Developer

Sean graduated with a B.S. in Electric Engineering concentrating in Software Development and a minor in Mathematics from the University of Memphis in 2000. Sean consulted as Systems Administrator for a number of Memphis businesses before relocating to DFW. Sean rediscovered his love for programming during a brief stay in College Station while his wife earned her masters from Texas A&M. Sean has developed cross-platform applications in Qt, Windows applications in C# and internet applications in php, html and javascript. All these skills have been necessary for the Apiary Project. The project utilizes virtual VMWare servers, physical servers and a VirtualBox deliverable. Servers primarily run Ubuntu desktop or server. Server side applications heavily relied upon include Drupal, Tomcat java web server, adore-djatoka image server, varnish http accelerator, fedora-commons digital repository, islandora, Solr indexing search platform, multiple OCR engines, HERBIS natural language processor and LAMP. Development skills include php, mysql, java, javascript, jQuery, Ajax, html and drupal programming. This allows the Apiary Project application to display php generated html and enable the user to interface with it via jQuery/javascript making ajax calls to drupal using drupal's modules, users, permissions and other features.


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Tiana Franklin

BRIT Collections Manager

Tiana is the Collections Manager in the BRIT (Botanical Research Institute of Texas) Herbarium, and also serves as a botanical data specialist on the Apiary Project. She graduated with a B.S. in Environmental Science (biology emphasis) and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Southern Methodist University, and with a M.S. in Environmental Science (botanical emphasis) from Texas Christian University. Her major responsibilities include maintaining the physical and virtual collections of the BRIT herbarium in such a manner that they are accessible and preserved for future use. Tiana assists with the botanical input for the Apiary Project and with the training and evaluation of Apiary volunteers.


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Jane Q. Huang

Research Assistant

Jane Q. Huang is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Information Science Doctoral Program in the College of Information, Library Science and Technologies. Her main research interests are information organization, information seeking, social networking, sociolinguistics, metadata and linked data on the Semantic Web. Before the project, she has worked as a reference librarian as well as a taxonomist with a major search engine company in San Francisco. Jane has worked and contributed to the metadata, data modeling, XML and RDF aspects of the project. She enjoys travel, cycling, Taichi, movie and iPad (the new toy).


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Zainab Arsiwala

Research Assistant

Zainab is a Masters Student in the Computer Science Department at the University of North Texas and a Research Assistant on the Apiary project. She is doing her specialization in Informatics and enjoys studying data mining and graph theory. Before the project, she has worked as a software engineer in India. Zainab has worked primarily in Drupal and Fedora Commons repository on this project. When not at work or school, Zainab enjoys cooking and trying out new cuisines.


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Moiz Bhukhiya

Research Assistant

Moiz is a Masters student in University of North Texas majoring in Computer Science. He is working as a PHP Developer on the Apiary project. He is primarily working on developing a Drupal module to integrate various components defined for Apiary project. His area of interest and specialization is networking and programming. He also worked as a JAVA developer at a research institute, TATA institute of Fandamental Research. Apart from work and school, he enjoys playing cricket, tennis, surfing internet and watching movies.


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Chaitra Urs

Research Assistant

Chaitra Urs is a Masters Student in Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of North Texas and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Apiary Project. Her area of specialization and interest includes Wireless Networks, Wireless Communication and Computer Networks. She has been working on the research and development of OCR engines using different training methodologies. She also enjoys listening to music along with painting, sketching and making creative art works.


Advisory Group



Jim Beach

Biodiversity Research Center
University of Kansas


Paul Berry

Director of the Herbarium
University of Michigan


Stan Blum

Research Information Manager
California Academy of Sciences


Chris Freeland

Director of Bioinformatics
Missouri Botanical Garden


Jane Greenberg

Associate Professor
Metadata Research Center
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


Gerald "Stinger" Guala

USDA, NRCS National Plant Data Center


Bryan Heidorn

National Science Foundation
Division of Biological Infrastructure


James Macklin

Director of Collections and Informatics
Harvard University Herbarium


Mark Phillips

Unit Head, Digital Projects Unit
UNT Libraries
University of North Texas


Martin Terry

Curator
Powell Herbarium
Sul Ross State University


Sula Vanderplank

Herbarium Collections Manager
Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden


John R. Wieczorek

Programmer/Analyst
The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
University of California, Berkeley