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Principal Investigators



team member portrait photograph

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.


team member portrait photograph

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.